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EDITED BY 

WILLIAM T. HARRIS, A.M., LL. D. 



Volume LV 



INTERNATIONAL EDUCATION SERIES. 

12ino, cloth, uniform, binding. 



T 



HE INTERNATIONAL EDUCATION SERIES was projected for the pur- 
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5. The Education of Man. By Friedhich Froebel. Translated and an- 

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OTHER VOLUMES IN PREPARATION. 



D. APPLETON AND COMPANY, NEW YORK. 



INTERNATIONAL EDUCATION SERIES 



GENETIC PSYCHOLOGY 
FOR TEACHERS 



BY ^- 
CHARLES HUBBAED JUDD, Ph. D. (Leipzig) 

INSTRUCTOR IN PSYCHOLOGY 
YALE UNIVERSITY 






NEW YORK 

D. APPLETON AND COMPANY 

1903 



THE. LIBRARY OF 
CONGRESS, 

Two Copies Received 

MAH 27 1903 

Copynglit Entry 

CLASS G^ XXc. No. 

COPY c. 



I -^ 



Copyright, 1903, 
By D. APPLETON AND COMPANY. 

Published March, 1003 



Electrotyped and Printed 

AT THE APPLETON PrESS, U. S. A. 



EDITOR'S PREFACE 



The publishers take pleasure in offering to the 
readers of the International Education Series a valu- 
able contribution drawn from the sources of experi- 
mental psychology. It has been prepared with good 
taste and sound judgment, and it is believed that all 
of the chapters will be read with interest and profit 
by those connected in any way with the work of 
teaching. 

Natural science has been remodeled in the past 
fifty years through the influence of the idea of evo- 
lution as interpreted by Darwin and his disciples. For 
a very long period science has meant the inventorying 
of facts and the organization of them into a system 
in such a manner that each fact throws light on all the 
other facts of its group. The idea of evolution brings 
into this older conception of science the idea of pro- 
gressive development. Under the most advanced inter- 
pretation, science is a history of the progressive con- 
quest of nature, first for purposes of life and second 
for purposes of conscious beings. The second of these 
purposes obviously brings the doctrine of evolution into 
close relation with education. Professor Judd, in his 
excellent remarks on adaptation in Chapter IV (page 



VI GENETIC PSYCHOLOGY FOR TEACHERS 

106), quotes Professor Minot: "Vital functions have 
a purpose — tlie maintenance of the individual or the 
race in the environment. The entire evolution of 
plants and animals is essentially the evolution of 
means of adjustment of the organism to external con- 
ditions." 

Adjustment has two sides. In one respect it relates 
to the modification effected in the individual in order 
to suit itself to the external conditions of its environ- 
ment. In the other respect, it relates to the modifica- 
tions effected in the environment to suit it to the indi- 
vidual — i. e., to the self-active being who desires to use 
it for food, clothing, or shelter, or some other purpose 
connected with its well-being. The mole acts on the 
earthworms and on their habitat, but he modifies him- 
self also. In the statement of Darwin the doctrine of 
natural selection seems in some respects to eclipse the 
doctrine of self-activity which furnishes the energy 
both of the adaptation of the self and of the environ- 
ment. Emerson's expression of the ideal of evolution 
(which, by the way, was written some time before 
Darwin's chief work) puts it thus: 

Striving to be man the worm 
Mounts through all the spires of form. 

Individual efforts at adaptation become social 
through heredity; that is to say, they go out from 
the individual to the species through heredity. But, 
in the more advanced stages of life and mind, educa- 
tion becomes the most important factor of progress. 
Professor Judd says : " The individual gets through 
imitation a kind of social inheritance that is different 



EDITOR'S PEEFACE Vll 

from the structural inheritance. Imitation has accord- 
ingly been called the means of social heredity " (page 
lOS). This doctrine is a very fundamental one and 
throws great light on ever}-thing coimected with edu- 
cation. 

Every teacher will be delighted with the exposition 
of this matter in the fourth chapter. The mole hunts 
earthworms and proceeds by minute steps of conceiv- 
ing a purpose, and of realizing this purpose, until it 
produces an hereditary change in its physique. The 
disuse of organs causes their diminution in the indi- 
vidual in the course of its own life, and after several 
generations the effect becomes visible as an inheritance, 
as a diminution or utter extinction of eyesight. 

The most wonderful thing about Darwims theory 
is that it makes introspection a power in the objective 
world, although Darwin was very reluctant to admit it. 
The doctrine of evolution sees in nature ^ a tendency 
to develop (or "select"*) such beings as possess inter- 
im ality and energize to realize their ideals. It is curious 
to note that this movement in science (Darwinian) be- 
gins by the utter repudiation of what is called teleol- 
ogy. It sets aside the old doctrine of design which 
looks for marks of external adaptation of nature to 
ulterior spiritual uses. But it notes everywhere the 
manifestation of instinct, appetite, desire, feeling, blind 

^ '-'Xatiire," said Plotinus (Ennead, iii, viii, iii), "is Philo- 
theamon, or greedy of beholding itself. A blind tendency in 
nature to develop some ideal implies as its logical condition a 
completely realized ideal in the absolute, the first principle of the 
world, through which nature is given its being." (Compare Psy- 
chological Foundations of Education, p. 21.) 



Vlll GENETIC PSYCHOLOGY FOR TEACHERS 

tendencies or impulses which indicate self-movement 
or self-activity in some shape. 

A plant has the power of digestion or assimilation. 
It is able to seize on external, inorganic objects and 
strip off their forms to convert them into vegetable 
cells and add them to its own structure, thereby build- 
ing with them its own organism. It multiplies itself 
into separate individualities through this process of 
the formation of external matter into cells of its own, 
each cell inspired with a low form of self-activity. 
But the animal shows a so much higher form of in- 
ternal life, being able to form representations within 
itself of its environment, and to will motions in its 
body based on its representations, that we begin to see 
how nature is striving to become introspective in its 
" natural selection " and its " survival of the fittest." 

Besides his clear exposition of the principles of 
evolution. Professor Judd has written many clear and 
helpful criticisms of existing methods and devices em- 
ployed in the schoolroom. 

An excellent criticism on Colonel Parker's method 
of teaching arithmetic — the method which insists on 
limiting the study of arithmetic to incidental use in 
connection with other branches of study — is to be found 
in Chapter IX. Also a quotation from Wundt at the 
end of the same chapter deserves the careful attention 
of those disciples of child-study who have not yet fully 
mastered the principles of the science. 

" It is an error," says Wundt, " to hold, as is some- 
times held, that 'the mental life of adults can never 
be fully understood except through the analysis of the 
child's mind. The exact opposite is the true position 



EDITOR'S PREFACE IX 

to take. Since in the investigation of children and 
of savages, only objective symptoms are in general 
available, any psychological interpretation of these 
symptoms is possible only on the basis of mature adult 
introspection which has been carried out under experi- 
mental conditions. For the same reasons, it is only 
the results of observations of children and savages 
which have been subjected to a similar psychological 
analysis, which furnish any proper basis for conclu- 
sions in regard to the nature of mental development 
in general." 

W. T. Hakeis. 
Washingtox, D. C, ITarchS, 1903. 



AUTHOE'S PKEFACE 



The experiences of a number of years spent in teach- 
ing psychology to classes of teachers in New York and 
Cincinnati have fully convinced me that the great ma- 
jority of teachers gain much by a careful scientific 
study of mental life. To be sure, there are teachers 
who are misled into a sentimental or superficial way 
of studying the child's mind, and there are certain forms 
of what is known as scientific psychology which have 
nothing to do with life of any sort and can therefore 
be of no value to teachers. These facts are enough to 
make one shrink from asserting unqualifiedly that 
teachers should study psychology. We can, however, 
on these very grounds, assert with the greater emphasis 
that teachers should be given some insight into scien- 
tific methods and results in order to save them from sen- 
timentality and vagueness, and in order to allow them 
to judge for themselves what facts of mental life are im- 
portant for the work of education and what are not. 

It is hoped that this book will serve in some measure 
to acquaint those for whom it is prepared with the 
spirit and results of the scientific study of mental de- 
velopment. To the critical student of science much 
of the material presented will not be at all new. I 
have borrowed freely, giving credit where I have re- 
produced matter which is not common property or 
not material of my own. In a number of the chapters 



Xll GENETIC PSYCHOLOGY FOR TEACHERS 

I have repeated from articles of my own which ap- 
peared in the Journal of Pedagogy, the Psychological 
Eeview, and the Philosophische Studien, I am under 
obligations to the editors of these journals for per- 
mission to reproduce here the substance of these earlier 
articles. The mode of presentation which has been 
followed throughout the book is that of a very infor- 
mal lecture discussion. After making this general ex- 
planation, I trust that it will be unnecessary to offer 
any special apologies for the frequent appearance of 
the first and second pronouns. Technical terms have 
been avoided as far as possible, and where they have 
been introduced, some explanation has always accom- 
panied each term at the time of its first appearance. 

In the final revision of the work for publication, I 
have been greatly aided by the criticisms and sugges- 
tions of my colleagues and friends. Professor Sneath, 
Dr. Eowe, and Dr. McAllister. One other obligation 
which I wish to acknowledge very fully is my obliga- 
tion to my students, many of whom have been teachers. 
From their suggestions I have learned much sound psy- 
chology and pedagogy, and through their cooperation 
the conclusions here embodied have been worked out. 
The present form of the discussions has been put to 
the practical test of presentation to a body of teachers. 
The teachers of Green County, Ohio, went through the 
book with me in very much its present form. Their 
acceptance of the principles and applications here advo- 
cated has encouraged me in deciding to seek a larger 
audience. 

C. H. J. 

New Haven, Conn., March, 1903. 



CONTENTS 



CHAPTER PAGE 

I. — Teacher-study, its scope and aims .... 1 

II. — How EXPERIENCES ARE CONSOLIDATED INTO INTER- 
PRETATIONS OP MEANING 36 

III. — The ORIGIN OF some of our educational IDEALS . 69 

IV. — The new ideals of development .... 98 

V. — Individuality, adaptation, and expression . . 129 

VI. — The teacher's writing habit 161 

VII. — Racial and individual development in writing . 197 

VIII. — The process of reading 236 

IX. — The idea of number 265 

X. — Some limitations of our nature .... 297 

siii 



GENETIC PSYCHOLOGY 
FOR TEACHERS 



CHAPTEE I 

TEACHER-STUDY, ITS SCOPE AND AIMS 

There is a kind of flattering sympathy with which 
it is not uncommon for those who speak to teachers to 
introduce their remarks. "You are an overworked 
class; you are the victims of an ignorant lack of appre- 
ciation on the part of the public; you ought not to be 
made to think more than five hours a day at the most, 
for it is too trying on the nerves of such highly organized 
human beings." How often have we heard remarks 
like these addressed to teachers, and accepted with a 
sort of self-righteous complaisance, exhibited in nods 
and smiles of approval or even in outbursts of applause! 
And how dangerous it would seem to be for any one to 
come before you with anjrthing but this conventional 
introduction! I feel compelled, however, to be frank 
with you and to say to you at once that the discussions 
which we are to hold, are all based on the fundamental 
belief that there are large possibilities of productive 
activity in the lives of teachers, many of which are 
wasted; that most of us could add many hours to our 
present periods of mental activity without harm; and, 
1 1 



2 GENETIC PSYCHOLOGY FOR TEACHERS 

finally, that if teachers are not appreciated by the pub- 
lic, it is very largely the fault of the teachers them- 
selves. 

Nor are these unconventional beliefs due to the fact 
that the speaker is unacquainted with the type of teach- 
ers who furnish the seemingly valid basis for the state- 
ment that members of our profession are overworked. 
It has been his lot to know intimately two great city 
school systems and a numberof smaller systems in which 
the complete and sudden remodeling of the course of 
study and the introduction of entirely new modes of ad- 
ministration have put upon the teachers a burden of 
unusual weight. Under such conditions of change in 
the course of study and in the mode of administration 
one would expect to find, if anywhere, overworked teach- 
ers. But if one observes carefully he will find that what 
so often seems to be overwork, is nothing but unneces- 
sary and harmful over-worry. The difficulty is not so 
much in the fact that teachers have to think and plan, 
as that they come to their work in a state of mental con- 
fusion and excitement which renders any task difficult. 
It is not so much that they are asked to take up new 
studies in the schools, as that they have allowed them- 
selves to drift into a form of mental life which is not 
congenial to any kind of innovation. All this means, 
in brief, if you will allow me to use the terms without 
any veneering, that we, as teachers, dealing with imma- 
ture miiids day after day, tend to become so self-satisfied 
and so fixed and dogmatic in our modes of thought and 
action that we stop growing and begin to get so far 
behind the times that we do not find it possible to keep 
up with reform when reform comes. 



TEACHER-STUDY, ITS SCOPE AND AIMS 3 

I have made bold to say these things at the very 
outset in order that we may begin our discussions with a 
clear recognition of their spirit and aims. For I should 
not be here with these statements about the dangers and 
difficulties of our professional lives if I did not believe 
with all certainty that it is possible to overcome this 
harmful over-worry and this confusion which doubles 
the burden of work. It is possible for teachers to save 
themselves from mental stagnation, to advance day by 
day, and thus keep pace with our rapidly progressing 
educational life. The condition, however, which must 
be fulfilled in order to attain these desirable ends is that 
teachers shall consider and apply to themselves some 
of the common principles of education. 

Did you never wonder why, in this age when we are 
studying so eagerly all the factors of the educational 
situation, no one has ever undertaken an exhaustive 
study of the teacher? We have a history of educational 
systems; we study present-day institutions and their 
organization; we study children with great care and 
with much enthusiasm; we take up psychology and soci- 
ology; but we do not seem to have waked up to the fact 
that bad order in our classes is sometimes a problem 
in teacher-study instead of child-study, that the intro- 
duction of a new subject into our schools is not always a 
question in sociology, but is more often a question of 
securing the cooperation of a body of teachers who, all 
unknown to themselves, are buried under a mass of tra- 
ditional ideas. 

Now do not have visions of a mass of dry material to 
be studied in this new science of teacher-study which I 
have brought to your attention, for I am not going to 



4 GENETIC PSYCflOLOGY FOR TEACHERS 

suggest that we send our elaborate questionnaires as our 
first step. I confess that when I look over some of the 
titles of child-study investigations, such as " Children's 
lies," " Effects of weather on children," " What children 
do out of school," etc., I have sometimes thought that 
it would be only fair for some juvenile victim of these 
child-study revelations to compare notes with his fel- 
lows on those modes of obscuring facts which are at 
times employed by teachers, and which parallel ethically 
what in children are called lies. And if the weather 
affects children, and if what children do outside of 
school affects their work in school, then why might not 
some of these same relations be assumed to have signifi- 
cance for the older and yet human individuals who 
conduct the affairs of the class-room? Some day the 
science of teacher-study may become mature enough 
and broad enough in its scope to venture on some of 
these investigations, which we now hardly dare to urge 
too seriously. For the present our range must be more 
limited. And yet I believe that within this narrower 
range the study can be made suggestive, if we will but 
look at ourselves fairly and frankly, and, having seen 
ourselves, not turn away and straightway forget what 
manner of men and women we are, but diligently and 
daily take up the task of educating ourselves as earnestly 
as we take up the task of educating others. 

There is another reason why it is right to urge upon 
you the importance of this study which we have called 
teacher-study. It is only through an intelligent interest 
in one's own development that one can gain a true un- 
derstanding of the needs of the developing child. 

Let me explain a little more fully what I mean. We 



TEACHER-STUDY, ITS SCOPE AND AIMS 5 

have learned as one of the great lessons of our child- 
study that children are not small adults. There are 
essential differences in nature between children and 
grown-ups, which make it necessary for us to treat chil- 
dren in a way appropriate to their special needs. Now, 
the general fact that children are different from our- 
selves is one which can be more or less fully grasped 
Avithout any profound study. But the teacher must go 
further than merely to grasp the general fact. The 
teacher must be able to understand in detail, first, his 
own mental characteristics, and secondly, the specific 
characteristics in which the child differs from himself. 
This is no easy task, for it is proverbial that by nature 
we interpret the thoughts of others in the light of our 
own experiences. If you think thus and so when you 
hear a certain sound, then you expect, unless your train- 
ing has shown you the truth, every one else to do the 
same under the same conditions. It requires some care- 
ful study, both of oneself and of others, to realize that 
thought processes in the presence of the same object 
may be very difl^erent in difl'erent individuals. It re- 
quires a good deal of the most careful kind of self -study 
as well as child-study for the teacher to realize anything 
about how the child before him really thinks and feels. 
Some hints as to the way in which children think 
and feel can be gathered from the few rather vague 
recollections that come to us of our own childhood's 
habits and experiences. Indeed, some one will do a 
great service for child-study if he will gather recollec- 
tions of this sort more extensively than they have ever 
been gathered and put them into systematic order. But 
recollections can give us only hints, and if these were 



6 GENETIC PSYCHOLOGY FOR TEACHERS 

the only connecting links between adult mental life 
and the child's mental life, our knowledge of the child's 
difficulties in mental growth would be indeed meager. 
Fortunately there is another bond of connection. Each 
of us has undeveloped faculties, dormant possibilities, 
which make us in certain particulars close friends of 
the child. If, recognizing this, we turn ourselves into 
both teachers and pupils at once, and watch our own 
dormant possibilities as they grow and develop, the ad- 
vantage will be twofold. We shall improve as pupils, 
and as teachers we shall learn some of the lessons of our 
art of instruction by seeing how the learner and the 
teacher may cooperate and how they have difficulty in 
understanding each other. 

Mark you, I do not say that adult education in these 
undeveloped functions is the exact ■ duplicate of that 
which should take place in the case of the child. What 
I do say is, that if you will discover some undeveloped 
faculty in your own mind and then observe its changes 
as you pass through the process of education, you will 
have one of the best experiences on which to base your 
child-study. For example, I once had a class of teachers 
who agreed to spend some time and practise in trying 
to improve their writing. We selected a very narrow 
line of study. Each of us tried to make the slope of his 
letters uniform, and to observe closely what the stages 
of development were. There are very few adults who 
have given much attention to the development of a uni- 
form slope of their letters. We found this, accordingly, 
a proper subject to study. The effort to improve gave 
us, individually and collectively, I am sure, more insight 
into the attitude which children take in their efforts to 



TEACHER-STUDY, ITS SCOPE AND AIMS 7 

learn to write, than could have been acquired from indefi- 
nite quantities of child-study unaided by teacher-study. 
And so I say we have a right to urge the importance of 
teacher-study as a necessary preliminary to child-study. 
The child's mind is indeed different from our own; if we 
would realize this fully, we must study the changes 
through which the learner passes, by direct, first-hand 
observation in ourselves. We must realize that mental 
progress never ends, and that at all stages it exhibits 
certain similarities and follows certain common princi- 
ples, and we must seek out these principles of develop- 
ment where alone we can come into direct contact with 
them — namely, in our own experiences. 

One does not need to go through any elaborate proc- 
ess of self -training in order to understand the meaning 
of development. He can find phases of his own expe- 
rience which indicate that he is indeed a step beyond the 
child in mental life, but by no means yet at the limit 
of possible progress. Take as one of the best illustra- 
tions of this general fact, the adult recognition of dis- 
tances and sizes. You see a man coming down the street 
two blocks away, and you recognize his true size with 
a fair degree of accuracy. This shows itself in the fact 
that your visual recognition of him does not have to be 
changed in any noticeable degree as he comes nearer. 
For short distances, such as two blocks, the facts which 
we all know as the facts of perspective do not make it 
difficult for us to recognize visual size. The result is, 
that in spite of the fact that the optical image of that 
man is much smaller at a distance of two blocks than 
it is at a distance of ten or twenty feet; in spite of the 
fact that you would have to draw the man much smaller 



8 GENETIC PSYCHOLOGY FOR TEACHERS 

if you wanted to represent him as two blocks away than 
if you wanted to represent him near at hand — in spite 
of these facts, you see him even at the greater distance 
in his normal dimensions. Put into other words, this 
means that you have so fully mastered the significance 
of this class of experiences that you get a fully devel- 
oped, accurate form of knowledge and experience with- 
out difficulty, whether the man is near at hand or two 
blocks away — that is, whether your visual image is large 
or relatively small. But now increase that two blocks 
to a mile, or, better still, climb up to the top of a 
high building and look down at the man. How does he 
look now? As large as usual? Of course not. Look 
at him as you will, he looks small. Even your knowledge 
of the fact that he is of the usual size does not help 
you. Even the dictum of some learned teacher could 
not make that man look as large as usual. The trouble 
is that our adult consciousness is not used to dealing 
with men at ranges of a mile, nor is it used to dealing 
with men a hundred feet below us. The man at a dis- 
tance of two blocks looked natural because he stood 
quite within the range of our ordinary training in the 
recognition of visual size. For short distances on level 
ground we have a developed faculty of recognition, but 
for long distances, and for comparatively short distances 
upward and downward, we have only very limited train- 
ing. Some one may be led to ask. At what range does 
adult recognition of size cease to be accurate and fully 
developed? We can not answer this question in a gen- 
eral way. Different individuals differ very greatly. The 
determining factor is the amount of experience. And 
to make this clear we may at once appeal to some illus- 



TEACHER-STUDY, ITS SCOPE AND AIMS 9 

trations, which will at the same time serve to show the 
value of this teacher-study for the comprehension of the 
child's mind. 

I remember when I was a little hoy riding across a 
high railroad bridge with my father. Down on the 
flat land at the river level were some laborers. I was 
much interested in them, they were such little men. 
I could have held one of them in my hand. I decided 
to share my delight with my father, and induced him 
to look out and see my pygmies. Like all children, I 
believed, of course, in the infallibility of my father and 
of my own eyes. My beliefs received something of a 
shock that day when he told me that my p5^gmies were 
just ordinary men, and turned back to his reading. I 
dare say I charitably attributed his remark to the rather 
superficial glance he had given the men; at any rate, I 
remember believing in the testimony of my eyes in 
that case, and silently protesting against what Avas, from 
my point of view, a most unaccountable lack of interest 
in a curious race of men. Need I add the explanation 
of this experience? A little greater elevation, a little 
less experience in the interpretation of visual sizes, and 
man and boy might have had experiences more alike. 
As it was, those men were inside the range of my 
father's interpretation of perspective, while they were 
outside of mine. 

Years after I was a party to a similar comparison 
of adult and child experience; this time, however, I 
was the adult. We were riding along together, and 
looking out over the broad pasture land, a little girl of 
six and I, when we saw some horses grazing quietly a 
quarter of a mile or so away. There was no difficulty 



10 GENETIC PSYCHOLOGY FOR TEACHERS 

in recognizing the horses as animals of full, ordinary 
size. And 1 Avas surprised into looking a second and 
even a third time by the little girl's cries of joy at 
seeing " those colts," as she insisted on calling them. 
Finally, I realized that the horses were to her untrained 
eyes colts. I even induced her to discuss the matter with 
me until I told her that they were really horses, and 
then the look of incredulous pity for my grown-up igno- 
rance gave me one of the best insights I have ever had 
into the truth of the principle that children and adults 
live in different worlds. I also had a clearer understand- 
ing of the child's mind at that moment from my under- 
standing of the fact that if the quarter of a mile had 
grown into two miles, I, too, might have been in doubt 
as to whether the horses were horses or colts. 

If these illustrations have served to arouse in your 
minds some idea of how the problem of recognition 
of size may be made productive as a special study for 
teachers, we are now in a position to take up in some- 
what more systematic fashion certain problems of 
teacher-study, which may be briefly indicated in the 
question. How do teachers, and indeed all adults, see 
and recognize form and size? The recognition of form 
is apparently a very simple function; and yet as our 
study progresses I believe we shall find that mental life 
as it appears in this function, is a most complex and 
highly developed form of activity. 

Suppose we start with the simplest possible figure — 
a straight line — and see what are some of the conditions 
of recognizing its length. To begin with, let me draw 
a line on the blackboard and ask you to draw on paper 
at your seats a line of equal length. The result will 



TEACHER-STUDY, ITS SCOPE AND AIMS 11 

invariably be (I have tried it time and time again with 
my classes) that your line on paper will be very much 
shorter than the one on the board, even if you foresee 
the result and try to aid your faulty recognition of 
length by adding somewhat to the line you would natu- 
rally draw. The fact is that the lines are so completely 
swallowed up by their surroundings that one can not 
see them apart from these surroundings. Estimated in 
terms of the blackboard, the line which I draw is short; 
if the same line were on paper it would not have the 
same relations to the surroundings, and consequently it 
would not seem short. If we start with this natural 
tendency to estimate lines in connection with their sur- 
roundings and give ourselves a little practise in the com- 
parison of different lines, we shall find that we soon 
become expert in estimating blackboard lines in terms 
of paper. This does not mean that we merely learn how 
to correct our natural error. We actually learn to look 
at the blackboard lines and the lines on paper in a more 
highly developed and accurate fashion. The best paral- 
lels I can think of are those which come in our ordinary 
experiences of fashions. You remember those large 
sleeves that the women used to wear. They looked 
natural enough once. The whole standard of our esti- 
mation of sleeves was, if you will allow the phrase, on a 
large, blackboard scale. Now we have a different scale, 
and some of our old photographs give us a curious im- 
pression of the absurd largeness of our earlier standard. 
We have changed in our mode of looking at the sizes of 
sleeves. That change has taken place so subtly and so 
gradually that we overlook the change. But that change 
has taken place, not as a mere superficial correction of 



12 GENETIC PSYCHOLOGY FOR TEACHERS 

our way of looking at things; it is rather a radical and 
fundamental form of mental growth. 

Come back now to our lines on blackboard and paper. 
Two facts are clear: the first is that ordinary adult 
experience is not developed fully in the translation of 
blackboard lines into lengths on paper; and the second 
fact is that we may gradually develop so that direct and 
accurate translation from blackboard to paper will be 
possible. And when this development has taken place, 
our mental life will be really different, just as our esti- 
mation of sleeves is different now from what it used 
to be. 

One might find any number of examples of tlie same 
general fact that we have illustrated with our black- 
board line, by comparing indoor objects with outdoor 
objects. Did you ever cut down a very small Christmas- 
tree and take it into the house and realize the difference 
in apparent size? Or have you tried to find a book in 
which to press autumn leaves, or noticed how small a 
chair looks when it stands out on the lawn? The lesson 
from all these illustrations is the same. We learn to 
recognize objects in their special environments, and if 
we are forced to look at them in new environments, we 
need more mental development. Do you wonder that 
children who have learned a certain fact in one simple 
connection need more mental development before they 
can make wider applications? 

Let us, however, carry our study forward by turning 
to certain figures which the psychologists have drawn 
in their investigations of these matters of visual esti- 
mation of size. These figures are so simple that one 
does not make a very great mistake in the estimation of 




TEACHER-STUDY, ITS SCOPE AND AIMS 13 

their size. But the figures are valuable material for 
our study, because, though the error is small, the condi- 
tions which give rise to the error are fairly simple and 
easy to comprehend. In Fig. 1, for example, there are 
two drawings which are in reality exactly alike in form 
and in size. The lower one seems, however, to be the 
larger of the two. The reason for this wrong estima- 
tion of size, or illusion as it is 
called, is not difficult to dis- 
cover. The two curved lines 
that bound either of the draw- 
ings are different in length and 
in degree of curvature. When, 
now, one begins to compare the 
sizes of the two enclosed areas 
he naturally gives his greatest 
attention to the neighboring 
parts of the drawings. This is 
what we ordinarily do in com- 
paring areas, and it is usually a 
successful method. But in this 
case the neighboring parts of 
the drawings furnish unsafe „ , 

° Fig. 1. 

guides. The short curve, which 

is the lower boundary of one drawing, gives the impres- 
sion that the whole area of that drawing is small, while 
the long sweeping curve which forms the neighboring 
boundary of the other drawing, gives the impression of 
bounding a larger surface. It makes no difference that 
the images in our eyes from these two surfaces are alike, 
the estimation goes astray in spite of the real identity of 
size and form. The interpretation is due to the relation 




14 CxENETIC PSYCHOLOGY FOR TEACHERS 

in which the drawings stand, rather than to the direct 
impressions themselves. If one wishes to emphasize this 
fact of the importance of the relative position of the 
figures, all one needs to do is to set the two drawings 
in a new relation, as is done in the second figure, when 
they will appear to be of the same size, as, indeed, they 
really are. 

These figures give us an important lesson, if we will 
only consider carefully their teachings. Visual recogni- 
tion of size is, after all, a complex process. It is not 
so much the image in the eye — that is, it is not so much 
the purely sensory fact which determines the recogni- 





Fia. 2. 

tion; it is much more the factor which we have called 
interpretation. 

I believe that most of us have a crude notion about 
the way in which we get our knowledge of the sizes of 
things, a notion hardly more advanced than that of the 
ancients. Let me give you the account written by the 
Latin poet Lucretius, of how we come to see shapes 
and sizes. " I say then," wrote Lucretius, " that pic- 
tures of things and thin shapes are emitted from things 
off their surface ... as a kind of film, or name it if 
you like a rind, because such image bears an appear- 
ance and form like to the thing, whatever it is, from 



TEACHER-STUDY, ITS SCOPE AND AIMS 15 

whose body it is shed and wanders forth. This you 
may learn, however dull of apprehension, from what 
follows. First of all, since among things open to sight 
many emit bodies, some in a state of loose diffusion, 
like smoke . . . some of a closer and denser texture, 
like the gossamer coats which at times cicades doff in 
summer . . . and the vestures which the slippery ser- 
pent puts off among the thorns." ^ These thin outer 
films, Lucretius tells us, fly through the air in all direc- 
tions and some of them enter the eye. With an exact 
copy of the object in the eye, Lucretius felt that his 
problem was solved. The mind sees what is in the 
eye, and the matter is disposed of. Of course we have 
advanced beyond Lucretius enough to know that there 
is no outside rind or film taken off the objects which 
we iee; but I venture the opinion that most of us are 
quite as satisfied as was Lucretius, if we can once ex- 
plain how the image gets into the eye. The light is 
focused in the eye as in a camera, we say, and here there 
is an exact photograph. How many of us have con- 
sidered carefully the next, and the next step? As a 
matter of fact, and our illustrations up to this point 
have amply verified the ' assertion, the mere reproduc- 
tion of equal lines and surfaces within the eye, is no 
guarantee at all that these lines and surfaces will be 
seen as equal. Seeing is a process of mental interpre- 
tation. It makes all the difference in the world what 
are the surroundings of the object. It is always a ques- 
tion of whether the mind has learned to take in its im- 
pressions in a fully developed or only in a partially de- 

^ Quoted from the English translation by H. A. J. Munro. 



16 GENETIC PSYCHOLOGY FOR TEACHERS 

veloped way. Seeing is, even in its simplest cases, a 
matter of interpretation rather tlian of mere passive 
impression. 

Do you not see the value of this conclusion for all 
phases of educational practise ? When the teacher once 
realizes that seeing is not merely getting images in his 
eyes, but a matter of interpretation, do you think he 
will ever be guilty again of believing that children see 
things because these things are held up before their 
eyes? Our teacher-study shows us that in order to be 
seen, things must be held up before our minds as well 
as before our eyes. 

Let us take up some other figures which will impress 
upon us still more deeply the lesson that seeing is a 
matter of mental interpretation. Fig. 3 represents two 
equal horizontal lines, with short additional lines form- 
ing arrow-heads at their extremities. The arrow-heads 
are turned in opposite directions in the two figures, and 
the effect is apparent in the underestimation of the 
upper figure and the overestimation of the lower figure. 
This figure can be modified by substituting for the 
arrow-heads complete or partial circles. One of the 
most interesting cases of this type of the illusion can be 
secured by asking some one to place four coins in such 
positions that the inner edges of one pair shall be the 
same distance apart as the outer edges of the other pair. 
Fig. 4 represents the way in which the coins should 
be placed to make the distances really equal. Of course, 
in the actual placing of the coins the false estimation 
will come out in the fact that the distances in question 
will not be made equal. 

Further interesting studies can be made by 



TEACHER-STUDY, ITS SCOPE AND AIMS 17 

changing the figure about in a variety of ways. 
Suppose we come back to a figure of the same type 
as those in Fig. 3. Let us take a line and put at 
one extremity an arrow-head turning inward, and at the 
other extremity an arrow-head turning outward, as in 
Fig. 5. In this figure there is added below, a plain hori- 
zontal line equal in length to the upper horizontal line 
which has the arrow-heads. Comparison between the 
two horizontal lines shows that the upper figure is ap- 




parently neither overestimated nor underestimated. I 
want to secure your special attention to this figure, for 
it is one of the best possible examples of what seems to 
be a simple visual process, and it can be shown to be in 
reality a most complex figure. As it stands in Fig. 5, it 
seems to be free from all illusion. But this is due to 
the fact that there is no adequate means in Fig. 5 of 
judging it. One would say, in similar manner, of one 
of the figures in Fig. 3, if he saw it standing alone, that 
there was nothing unusual about it. In Fig. 3 we be- 
come conscious of the illusion through a comparison of 
two different figures which are in reality equal. To 
become conscious of the illusion in Fig. 5 we must place 
about it and within it some points of reference which 
2 



18 GENETIC PSYCHOLOGY FOR TEACHERS 

will break it up into equal parts and furnish us with the 
means of seeing the illusion. This is done in Fig. 6. 
The short cross-lines, while they add nothing to the 

o o 

^^«— ^ Fig. 4. ^*^w,-«^ 

main figure, serve as points of comparison. Thus the 
cross-line A, between the arrow-heads, is equally distant 
from the two ends of the line. The short lines, M 
and Ny at the left and right of the upper figure, are also 
placed at equal distances from the ends of the line. The 
same relative points are indicated lower down in the 
case of the plain line in the figure. Now we see that the 
arrow-heads have, after all, had a very marked influ- 
ence on our visual process. The right side of the upper 
line, even though we did not know it in Fig. 5, was 
stretched out in our recognition of it, and the left side 
was correspondingly shortened. The space outside of 
the line was infringed upon on the right side, and the 
end of the line was drawn back out of the empty space 
on the left. In short, the presence of those arrow-heads 
changed the whole internal and external character of 
the line. This is just as true, let me repeat, in Fig. 5 
as in Fig. 6. The difference is that in Fig. 6 we have 
provided the means of bringing it into consciousness. 



TEACHER-STUDY, ITS SCOPE AND AIMS 



19 



while in Fig. 5 no such means were present. Thus we 
see that we can not trust our ordinary observation to 





Fig. 5. 

discover all the facts in regard to our processes of recog- 
nition. Suppose, for example, that we had stopped in 
our study with Fig. 5. We should have thought of the 
whole process as very simple, whereas, as a matter of 
fact, it is, as shown by Fig. 6, very complex. 



M 




N 



Fig. 6. 



Do not try to resist this conclusion to which we have 
been coming, by an appeal to ordinary experience. Do 
not say that seeing straight lines seems like a very simple 
and easy process. This seeming ease, and accuracy of 
visual perception, is like the seeming ease of walking. 



20 GENETIC PSYCHOLOGY FOR TEACHERS 

Walking is, however, as we all know, a complex product 
of development, apparently easy and complete so far as 
immediate individual experience goes, because of long 
practise, and because the environment is familiar. One 
of the best ways to study walking, from the point of view 
of one's own experience, is to change the environment, 
as when one tries to walk a tight rope. Then one un- 
derstands, perhaps better than ever before, something 
of the child's difhculty in keeping his balance and con- 
trolling his feet. In a similar way one realizes that 
seeing and interpreting lines is a difficult process when 
he tries to interpret lines in a new environment. Or 
an adult may realize something of the child's condition 
when this same adult puts himself under the directions 
of a drawing teacher, and finds by comparison of his 
own ability with that of his teacher that the ordinary 
person is only partially trained in the recognition of 
forms and distances. 

Mental life is made up of processes which, like the 
ability to see lines, have reached a certain level, and 
have then become fixed. In other words, at this level 
the processes have stopped developing. We stand 
where we are to-day, forgetful of the past, and ignorant 
of the changes which that past has worked out, and 
consequently blind to the possibilities which lie beyond 
us. Our study of these simple lines ought to show us 
something of the nature and possibilities of mental de- 
velopment. The teacher who gets stranded at one stage 
of development and knows no past or future, is not fit 
for his profession, for he can not realize what the child 
has to pass through, and he has no outlook for his own 
improvement. 



TEACHER-STUDY, ITS SCOPE AND AIMS 21 

The great lessons that come to us as students of 
even such minor forms of mental development, are tol- 
erance and sympathy for those below us and ambitions 
for better thing in our own lives. If even a few teach- 
ers would take these lessons in regard to space percep- 
tion to heart and put themselves through a course of 
training in drawing, and give us accounts of their ex- 
periences, we should have a very valuable chapter added 
to our teacher-study. 

Such a study of our mental development would need 
to supplement itself with some carefully kept records, 
for there is nothing so easy as to forget what one did and 
thought at an earlier stage of development. Have you 
ever worked at a problem slowly and laboriously until 
the solution was reached, and then wondered how in the 
world you could have failed to recognize what is now 
so clear? The earlier stage of development in which 
the problem was not solved, is soon forgotten when you 
take that forward step which brings you to the solution. 
It is this forgetfulness of where one started which 
makes it so hard to show the right degree of sympathy 
for those who do not comprehend at their lower level 
of mental development which one has learned to see so 
clearly at a higher level. So I say it would be well for 
us each to go through some series of. mental develop- 
ments and leave behind him some carefully preserved 
records. This has been done in one case of space per- 
ception with sufficient completeness to furnish us an 
interesting and helpful example. 

The facts I am about to describe now will also illus- 
trate to you what the psychologists call an experiment. 
We all of us know what an experiment in physics is, or 



22 GENETIC PSYCHOLOGY FOR TEACHERS 

an experiment in chemistry, but it sounds a little odd 
at first to speak of experimenting with one's mental 
processes. And yet there is a good deal of psychological 
experimenting which is going on these days, and we 
are learning more about mental life than we ever knew 
before, because of the large possibilities of gaining new 
information which are afforded by these experiments. 
Our next description will, therefore, have a double sig- 
nificance. It will be a description of a psychological 
experiment on the development of perception of length, 
and as such it will give you some insight into the char- 
acter of the experimental process and into the method 
of taking records, and it will also throw light on our 
problem — the nature of our visual perception of form. 

Two figures like those with which we became 
acquainted in Fig. 3, with the arrow-heads turning out- 
ward and inward, were drawn on cards in such a way 
that by slipping an easily adjustable card backward and 
forward over a fixed card, one of the figures could be 
lengthened or shortened to suit the wishes of the person 
on whom the experiment was tried. Fig. 7 will make 
the arrangement intelligible. On the fixed card. A, was 
drawn a long line with a single arrow-head turning out- 
ward. Over this long line was placed the adjustable 
card, B, on which was drawn the short figure with the 
arrow-heads turned inward. The cards were then 
placed one on the other, as indicated in the lowest dia- 
gram in Fig. 7. At A and B we had the two figures, and 
by moving the card B backward and forward, the lines 
could be made to seem equal. The person trying the 
experiment, or the subject as we call him, adjusted A 
by moving B, until the two figures seemed equal. His 



TEACHEEl-STUDY, ITS SCOPE AND AIMS 23 

only task was to make the lines seem equal, not to make 
them really equal. When this had been done we had. 






Fig. 7. 



24 



GENETIC PSYCHOLOGY FOR TEACHERS 



in the difference between the lines A and B, a measure 
of the illusion; for the greater the illusion, the greater 
was the difference between the length of the lines. 

This experiment was tried by the same person hun- 
dreds of times, with carefully recorded results, and the 
results showed that the illusion gradually grew less and 
less intense as practise went on. Let me give you the 
results of these experiments in graphic form. Figs. 8 
and 9 are made up from the tables of measurements 
from two different persons. 

The meaning of these figures is not difficult to under- 
stand, if one remembers that any point in space has both 
horizontal and vertical position. Take, for example, 
the point at which the irregular ascending line in Fig. 



54 <- 

53 

52 

51^ 

50 

U9 

IS^ 

hi 

m 

U5 

M 



-Length of Standard- 




20 90 leO 220 '-^SOi 35i iio 1,10 J30 <>30 730 7S0 'iSO SOO OM 9S0 



Fig. 8. 



8 begins. This point has a certain vertical position — 
that is, it is at a certain distance from the base-line 
of the figure. It has also a horizontal position — that 
is, it is at a certain distance from the left-hand bound- 
ing line. In like manner every other point in the ir- 
regular ascending line has both vertical and horizontal 



TEACHER-STUDY, ITS SCOPE AND AIMS 25 

position. Now, in such, figures as 8 and 9 we use tliese 
vertical and horizontal distances to express two different 
kinds of facts. First, if we want to show the amount of 
the illusion, we place a point at a certain distance above 
the base-line. In this way distance from the base-line 
in Figs. 8 and 9 comes to mean degree of illusion. Along 
the left-hand edge of the figure you will find certain 
numerals which make this matter of quantity still more 
definite. Thus, in Fig. 8, 44 at the very base-line means 
that the length of the line A (Fig. 7) in the first experi- 
ments was 44 millimeters. The numerals 45 to 54 then 
indicate various lengths through which the line A (Fig. 




950 



Fig. 9. 



7) passed until finally it came very nearly to the length 
54, which is the length of the standard line B (Fig. 7). 
If, now, one takes any point in the regular ascending 
line of the figure, and refers to this series of numerals 
at the left, he can see how long the line A (Fig. 7) 
was at that stage of the experiment. 



26 GENETIC PSYCHOLOGY FOR TEACHERS 

At the same time any given point in the ascending 
line has horizontal position. This horizontal position 
is used to express the number of experiments that 
have been tried, and the numbers at the bottom of the 
figure indicate how many experiments are represented 
by each point. Thus the line begins in Fig. 8 at 20 
and ends at 980. This means that 980 experiments were 
were tried in all. The fact that we progress by twenties 
is accounted for by the fact that in most cases in this 
experiment twenty measurements were averaged before 
being entered in the table. The various vertical lines 
that interrupt the ascending line tell you how the ex- 
periment was arranged as to time. Each single vertical 
line means a pause of a few hours in the experiment. 
A double vertical line means a pause of a night. 

I hope that this will make clear the significance of 
Figs. 8 and 9. Two persons began setting the lines 
represented in Fig. 7 with very marked errors, and as 
the trials proceeded, these persons gradually improved 
until, finally, after 980 trials in one case, and after 950 
trials in the second case, they set the two lines nearly 
right. Note carefully that this does not mean that the 
persons in question came to be able to correct their 
wrong way of seeing the lines through some after- 
thought about the illusion. The fact which is signifi- 
cant in this experiment is that, after a good deal of 
setting of these lines, one gets such complete control 
of the arrow-heads at their extremities that he sees the 
lines as they should be. He undergoes the same kind 
of change in the way of looking at these lines as that 
which all of us have undergone in our way of looking at 
big sleeves. The interpretation has changed. Mental 



TEACHER-STUDY, ITS SCOPE AND AIMS 27 

life has developed in a small way, and the arrow-heads 
which were before confusing additions to the horizontal 
lines, have now been mastered. The arrow-heads are 
accordingly no longer sources of an illusion; they are 
regularly interpreted factors. 

I wish every teacher could be induced to try this or 
some similar experiment, so that he or she might learn 
in his or her own experience what changes in mental life 
a little training can bring about. The meaning of the 
statement that children see things in a way that is differ- 
ent from ours would become a living fact, rather than a 
bare statement. This experiment shows in the brief 
space of a few days Avhat in ordinary life, where no atten- 
tion is given to this illusion, would never take place at 
all. It is therefore an interesting case of development 
beyond ordinary experience. Furthermore, the fact 
that a record was kept makes it possible for us to give a 
very exact account of the way in which the development 
took place. 

Something of the same kind can be seen when one 
goes back, after a long absence, to the home of his child- 
hood, and notes the smallness of the house and yard and 
the small elevation of the neighboring hills and the 
nearness of the next house. To one's childish mind dis- 
tances were much vaster than they are now in adult life. 
One has undergone in all these years a slow transforma- 
tion in his mode of seeing things. The whole in- 
terpretation of objects is on a different scale. This is 
clearly a case of mental development, though it is de- 
velopment in a relatively simple function, the function 
of seeing sizes. Eemember that if such a simple mode 
of interpretation is capable of such marked transforma- 



28 GENETIC PSYCHOLOGY FOR TEACHERS 

tions through accumulation of experience, then the 
more complex modes of interpretation must be capable 
of much greater development through similar processes 
of experience. 

Let us come back, after this description of actual 
observations and records of the transformations which 
can be produced through practise, to a more complete 

illustration of the fact 
» II M »i I I I I H » n 1 with which we began— 

the fact that there are 
a great many illusions 
into which our unde- 
veloped adult conscious- 
ness falls. If you draw 
two lines of equal length 
and then break up one of the two with a series of short 
cross-lines, as in Fig. 10, the two lines will no longer 
look equal, but the interrupted line will seem longer. 
The same principle holds for squares which have been 
broken up by cross-lines, as shown in Fig, 11. This 
whole group of illusions is described by the general 
name, illusions of filled space. The name means, of 



Fia. 10. 



Fig. 11. 

course, not that one line or one square is absolutely 
empty space and the other filled, but that in one case 



TEACHER-STUDY, ITS SCOPE AND AIMS 29 

the filling is of such a special, noticeable character 
that it is, as compared with the other, uniform line, 
or square, much more filled. The illusion is easy to 
understand. There is more to pay attention to in 
the filled figure. This moreness we easily turn into 
moreness of length, while as a matter of fact it is 
merely moreness of filling. Again it is interpretation 
that is accountable for the illusion. 

An interesting fact in this connection is that with 
large objects our interpretation is governed by other 
motives. In the case of an empty room, for example, 
the barren lack of furnishings calls our attention to the 
size, and the empty room looks unusually large, not 
small like the empty square. Or again, when the stripes 
which in our figure of the square make the figure look 
wide, are transferred to a garment, the effect is to carry 
vision upon and down the lines and to call special atten- 
tion to the length instead of to the width, and thus we 
come to understand the various forms of subtle art by 
which the rotund matronly figure is elongated to our 
guileless and undeveloped eyes. 

Again we may refer to a group of striking figures 
in which the false estimation of distances results in 
a distortion of directions. The earliest figure of this 
sort to be noted and described was found on a tapestry 
pattern. It is reproduced in Fig. 12. The long vertical 
lines are parallel, but they seem to converge and diverge, 
thus giving the whole figure an irregular character, 
which destroys entirely the parallel appearance. The ex- 
planation of this figure does not seem to be simple. The 
short cross-lines are evidently the factors which com- 
plicate interpretation; but the exact way in which the 



30 



GENETIC PSYCHOLOGY FOR TEACHERS 



cross-lines produce their effect is difficult to determine. 
There is a simpler figure of closely related type to which 
this complex pattern is generally reduced for purposes 




of explanation. The simpler figure is presented in Fig. 
13. Here the long oblique line is the center of inter- 
est. It is interrupted by the space between the two 
verticals. The result is that one can not see the oblique 

line as a single continu- 
ous line. The left-hand 
part seems somewhat too 
high, while the right-hand 
part is too low. If now 
one thinks of the oblique 
lines as increased in num- 
ber, as in Fig. 12, they be- 
come the stronger factors, 
and they succeed in tip- 
ping the interrupting 
lines, and do not them- 
selves suffer deflection as in the simpler figure. 

Another interesting group of illusions appears in 
certain architectural forms. A high column, for ex- 



FiG. 13. 



TEACHER-STUDY, ITS SCOPE AND AIMS 31 

ample, the sides of which ascend in perfectly straight 
lines, seems to be too slender at its middle point. In 
other words, such ascending boundaries of a column 
naturally apj)ear slightly concave at the middle. It has 
often been noted that the Greek columns were so con- 
structed as to counteract this illusion by having a 
marked convexity of their ascending lines — that is, the 
Greek columns were really slightly bulging at the 
middle, so that they might produce the pleasing im- 
pression of straightness rather than concavity. 

Enough, however, has been said to make clear the 
fact which we started out to emphasize in this first 
discussion. The teacher's own mental life is a world in 
which marked variations and undeveloped possibilities 
are always showing themselves, if we will only look for 
them It is not merely in the more complex processes 
of reasoning and lofty thought that this holds true. It 
is true that even in the simplest process of recognition 
of very commonplace figures, we have much that might 
be improved by training and development. 

It remains, in closing this first discussion, for us to 
ask, why do we not ordinarily develop further in our 
recognition of forms. The answer is not far to seek. 
Ordinarily practical life does not demand it, and we sim- 
ply live on with half-developed faculties, because these 
are good enough to meet our immediate needs. We are 
like men of every age, for in every age there have been 
intellectual prizes which have awaited the finding; but 
men have lived on and on, satisfied with good enough, 
until some vigorous, self-possessed mind has appeared 
and has boldly sought to improve beyond the immediate 
practical demands of the lower life. Such a mind always 



32 GENETIC PSYCHOLOGY FOR TEACHERS 

finds eilort repaid by further improvement, until finally 
he comes to live at a new level, with broader outlook in 
every direction. If we would realize the true meaning 
of the word education, we must think of it not merely 
as a word to apply to others; we must think of the pos- 
sibilities of self-improvement. Teachers often get so 
absorbed in doling out, over and over again to their 
children, the same little fund of facts, the same little 
incentives to new experience, that they come to think 
of themselves as finished products. The practical les- 
son of self-knowledge, which will grow clearer to you 
from any intelligent study of your own faculties, is that 
you can sympathetically help others to grow only while 
you are growing yourself. 

If you have observed all there is to be seen in a 
plant or animal, I mean if you think you have observed 
all there is, then throw it away, it is useless for a lesson 
in nature-study. The true view, the view you must get 
if you would be a helpful teacher, is that you have still 
before you large unexhausted possibilities. You may 
be a little in advance of the children, indeed you ought 
to be; but if you are so far in advance of them that you 
have no bonds of sympathy in undeveloped faculties 
which you recognize, then you can not understand them 
and they will not understand you. 

And now to make these general statements more 
specific, and to give the illustrations of spacial form 
which we have been studying in our recent discussions 
some direct practical bearing, let it be noted that our 
recognitions of form and size are in general very much 
in need of special training. 

The subject of form-study, vfhich is gradually com- 



TEACHER-STUDY, ITS SCOPE AND AIMS 33 

ing to have a recognized place in our elementary schools, 
is one of the most timely additions to our course of study. 
The reason that the value of form-study is not more fully 
realized by teachers is that teachers are very generally 
without knowledge of how exceedingly defective is their 
own mastery of form. We look at all sorts of objects in 
adult life in the most superficial way. We have liter- 
ally cultivated the habit of neglecting form by our 
failure to develop this phase of our mental lives. The 
result is obvious in a thousand ways. We miss not only 
the esthetical pleasures that we might gain, but we miss 
also the great funds of information which might be had 
from the mere looking at objects, if we would only look 
with the mind's eye and not with a vacant and uninter- 
ested gaze. I should say to teachers, learn to look at 
everything that presents itself, and note its form and 
size and position. If the object has no other value, 
there is at least value in the training of one of your 
faculties. Furthermore, such careful observation may 
bring out values which you know not of. The basis of 
higher mental life must be laid before that higher life is 
possible. The trouble with most of us is that we try 
to carry on the training of our faculties from the wrong 
end. We get books on art and architecture, instead of 
going out and getting our eyes open to the facts that 
would put content into our reading. Let us change all 
this. We are beginning to do it for the children in the 
schools, in that we are beginning to train them in the 
rudiments of seeing. This reform in the schools would 
stride forward with great rapidity if we could only real- 
ize our own needs as teachers. Let us begin this train- 
ing of ourselves. 
3 



34 GENETIC PSYCHOLOGY FOR TEACHERS 

One of the best ways that I know of to train oneself 
in observing, is to begin drawing. Draw some one thing 
every day. It need not take very much time. Go home 
and draw something to-day. Do it in the privacy of 
your own room if you are ashamed of the results. Do 
not tear it up when it is done, but go out after you have 
drawn and look at the object again. You will look with 
keener interest and insight and you will do better next 
time. Do not do this for the sake of trying to become 
an artist, and do not drop your practise after the third 
or fourth day. Remember this is a normal school in 
which the teacher is pupil as well as faculty. You will 
be repaid in time more than you imagine. You will not 
need to worry about examinations in your normal 
school; you will not need to be afraid of changes in the 
course of study. And I venture the prophecy that you 
will not be exhausted by this work. It is not the kind 
of work that teachers who are overworked, as they call 
it, complain about. They complain about work that 
does no contribute to their mental growth and is not 
done in pursuit of this kind of self -improvement. 

But I will not exhaust your patience with exhorta- 
tion. If the moral of our introductory discussion is not 
clear now, it never will be. Let us review briefly as we 
close. Teacher-study will help us to understand our- 
selves and will indirectly help us to understand the chil- 
dren. If we take some of the simplest acts of seeing 
lines and figures, we shall find that we have yet large 
possibilities of development, and we shall find that de- 
velopment means a change of a very fundamental type 
in our modes of mental recognition. These possibilities 
of development, as well as the figures by which the pos- 



TEACHER-STUDY, ITS SCOPE AND AIMS 35 

sibilities were revealed, all go to show that recognition 
of size is a fact of interpretation, not a mere fact of im- 
pression. And finally, the practical pedagogical lesson 
is that interpretation of size and form may, and should 
be more highly cultivated by all of us. 



CHAPTER II 

now EXPERIENCES ARE CONSOLIDATED INTO INTERPRE- 
TATIONS OF MEANING 

Did you ever ask yourself why it is that we have 
two eyes and two ears? We all recognize the fact that 
we need two legs in order to make walking possible; 
that we frequently need two hands — one to hold the ob- 
ject on which we are working, and the other to do the 
manipulating. But I venture to say that most people 
are not aware that seeing is never perfect unless both 
eyes are cooperating, and that hearing is never complete 
unless both ears are in use. The truth is that natural 
and complete visual and auditory experiences are just 
as much dependent on our two organs of sight and hear- 
ing as natural walking is dependent on the combined 
action of two legs. And the unfortunate individual 
who is deprived of one eye or one ear, has to make use 
of unusual and clumsy means of sight and hearing, just 
as the man deprived of one of his legs has to make use 
of clumsy devices for walking. 

Let us demonstrate this in a simple experiment with 
hearing. The experiment is one which can be per- 
formed very easily by any one. Ask the person on 
whom the experiment is tried, or the observer as we 
may call him, to close his eyes, and then let the experi- 
36 



HOW EXPERIENCES CONSOLIDATE 37 

menter make some sort of a snapping sound (snapping 
the fingers or snapping with a card will produce suitable 
sounds) just in front of the middle of the observer's 
face or just behind the middle of the back of his head. 
You will find that the observer will make the greatest 
mistakes in trying to tell where the sound came from. 
Sometimes when it is in front of him he will tell you it 
is behind, and vice versa. In other words, for sounds 
which are thus half-way between the two ears, there is 
no means of distinguishing easily the difference be- 
tween what is in front and what behind. Now let the 
experimenter move his hand in making the snapping 
sound slightly to the right or left of the middle line, 
and it will be found that the observer can give much 
more accurate localizations — that is, the moment the 
sound is stronger in one ear than it is in the other, the 
observer has a complex experience which makes it pos- 
sible for him to make a comparison and to understand 
his impressions. The two ears cooperate in these latter 
cases, in that one reports the sound with a greater in- 
tensity than does the other, and by this means the ob- 
server recognizes that the sound is on the side of the 
greater intensity. 

We make use of the same principle in ordinary life. 
When one wishes to locate a sound, he moves his head 
around in this direction and in that until finally he gets 
a different impression in the two ears, and then he can 
locate the source of the sound on the side of the stronger 
impression. It is probably true that the difference in 
the way in which the sound gets into the two ears is 
also of importance, but our discussion need not go into 
further detail. You see that^ after all, there is some 



38 geni:tic psychology for teachers 

necessity in ordinary hearing for the use of both ears, 
at least, if we are to know accurately where the source 
of the sound is located. 

Similar facts can be demonstrated for the eyes. 
Most of us believe that the world looks the same when 
viewed with one eye closed as it does when viewed with 
both eyes open. A simple experiment will convince you 
that one-eyed vision is less complete than two-eyed 
vision. Close one eye. Hold up some small object 
directly in front of the open eye — a pencil or one of your 
fingers will do; or it will be better yet if you will let 
some one else hold something in front of you. Now 
raise your right hand above your head so that it is out 
of the range of vision, and rapidly bring it straight 
down, trying to place the end of your index-finger on the 
end of the object. After you have brought the finger 
down and failed to touch the object, open the closed 
eye and see how clearly the mistaken positions of finger 
and object are seen with two eyes. One who has tried 
this experiment a number of times will never be in any 
doubt as to the fundamental value of two eyes. With 
two eyes we see the position of objects in depth clearly 
and vividly; with one eye a great part of this recogni- 
tion of depth is lost. If you once get into the habit of 
observing this difference, you can notice it in a great 
variety of cases. Close one eye and look at a distant 
group of trees, at a house, or at some object in the room, 
as a chair, and notice how flat they all look. The best 
instant at which to notice this flatness is just at the 
moment when you open the closed eye and see the ob- 
ject fairly leap into depth. 

This difference between one-eyed vision and two- 



HOW EXPERIENCES CONSOLIDATE 39 

eyed vision is due to the fact that the two eyes get differ- 
ent views of any object at which they look. With the 
right eye you see a little farther around the right side 
of the object, and with the left eye you see farther 
around the left side of the object. The result is that 
the image in one eye is different from the image in the 
other eye. Our idea of depth depends on this differ- 
ence. This is very neatly illustrated in the common 
instrument with which you are doubtless acquainted, 
namely, the stereoscope. You will recall that there are 
always two pictures to look at. These two pictures are 
mounted in such a way that one is seen with the right 
eye, the other with the left. You may not have noticed 
it, but the two pictures, the one on the right and the 
one on the left, are different. They were made in 
cameras that have two separate openings corresponding 
to the two eyes. One picture shows a little more of the 
left side of objects, while the other shows a little more 
of the right side. If it were not for this difference and 
for the fact that this difference is now preserved for your 
vision, in that you look at the two pictures through the 
stereoscope so as to introduce one picture into one eye, 
and the other picture into the other eye — I say if it were 
not for this difference in the two photographs, you could 
not see the solidity which is the charm of stereoscopic 
pictures. 

The question which arises at once after one has 
been shown by these experiments the importance of 
two-eyed vision is. Why is it, that when we close one 
eye, things are not ordinarily recognized as unusually 
flat? The answer to this question is to be found in 
the statement that in ordinary one-eyed vision which is 



40 GENETIC PSYCHOLOGY FOR TEACHERS 

not subjected to close examination, we get the meaning 
of what we see by the aid of past experience. We do 
not see things flattened out as they really are presented 
to the single eye, but we see beyond the flatness and 
understand what the objects would be if we saw them 
with both eyes. In other words, we have become so 
accustomed to our full two-eyed form of interpretation, 
that, even though only half the usual amount of visual 
experience is present, we turn it into the usual mold of 
complete interpretation. In doing this we are aided 
by the familiarity of the objects and by our knowledge 
of their surroundings. If we prepare groups of rela- 
tively strange objects in a wholly unknown order, as 
we can easily do by passing threads backward and for- 
ward at difl^erent levels in a box, then one-eyed recogni- 
tion of depth becomes almost or quite impossible. 

" But," some one will probably ask, " how is it that 
we never recognize in ordinary life what impressions are 
coming in at the one eye or the other, and at the one 
ear or the other? If it is true that the two organs of 
sense in each case are of such importance, why do we 
need to make this careful study to find it out? " If you 
will get the true answer to these questions, you will 
have one of the important facts in regard to your own 
mental lives. The fact is that we do not pay attention 
to sense impressions for the sake of getting the im- 
pressions themselves; we pay attention to sense impres- 
sions for the sake of understanding their meanings. 
Now, the differences in auditory intensity which come to 
us through the two ears, are of no interest as mere facts 
of intensity, but they are rich with meaning; and that 
meaning is what we have learned to recognize. Inten- 



HOW EXPERIENCES CONSOLIDATE 41 

sities mean, in such cases, position in space. In the 
same way the different views of objects which we get 
in the two eyes, are of no interest as different views, but 
they are of great interest in their meaning, for the mean- 
ing of these differences is solidity and depth. The sol- 
idity and depth is what we see, for at our advanced stage 
of mental development we attend to the meaning only, 
and neglect entirely the simple fact of sensory differ- 
ences from which we derive the meaning. 

Mental life is made up in very large measure of 
these processes of getting behind experiences and grasp- 
ing meanings. Take, for example, our recognition of a 
word. A word taken as a mere sound is a very meager 
experience. Take such a sound as " cold." Pay atten- 
tion to it as a sound. It is hard and guttural. There 
is nothing attractive about it; taken all in all, as a mere 
sound, it promises little for any one's thinking. Im- 
agine yourself a foreigner, unacquainted with all the 
fulness of meaning that we put into the world because 
we understand it, and you will recognize what we are 
trying to emphasize when we say that our mental states 
are not bound down to present impressions, but are con- 
stantly reaching out, and are attaching to the impres- 
sions a rich fund of interpretation. 

Or take another illustration. What is a coin to 
the intelligent adult? Is it a bit of metal with certain 
decorations? As a matter of ordinary experience, you 
know how little attention we usually pay to the decora- 
tions. It is a commonplace form of amusement to try 
to see how little most people know about what is on 
coins. Greenbacks are overlooked in the matter of ap- 
pearance, even more than coins. Our memory of the 



42 GENETIC PSYCHOLOGY FOR TEACHERS 

size of a common greenback is very defective. But 
when it comes to meaning, we all have a clear realiza- 
tion of the meaning of currency. We know that there 
is a certain additional fact behind the mere appearance 
of the coin or the greenback, which additional fact we 
call value. Value is the power to bring us desirable 
things through exchange. This understanding of value 
is not present in the child's mind, for the child has had 
no experience on which to base recognition of mean- 
ings. He is engrossed in the bright hard metal. JSTot 
so with us. We receive the impression, to be sure, but 
we do not linger even for a moment on the impression. 
Our attention is upon the remoter significance. Just 
as we see solidity in ordinary one-eyed vision, which is 
in reality flat and meager in content, so here in the bit 
of silver, we realize the possibilities of new experiences 
not revealed at the moment. 

Mental life is full of illustrations of this type. In- 
deed, so constantly do we attend to meanings instead of 
to the real mental states that it is for the most part im- 
possible for us to separate the two. When we look away 
across the landscape, for example, and see the distant 
green fields, we are having an experience in which the 
present impression and its meaning are very closely 
woven together. As a matter of immediate vision, the 
color which the eye receives from those distant so-called 
green fields, is a very dark bluish green — indeed, in 
some cases it may even be distinctly blue; but we do 
not ordinarily notice that. We have come, through past 
experience, to know that colors grow darker and milder 
in tone, as their sources are more and more removed 
from us, and so we think of the distant blue-green, not 



HOW EXPERIENCES CONSOLIDATE 43 

as it looks, but as it means. There where the grass is 
growing it is bright green, and the patch of color in our 
landscape, which is not bright green, means that grass, 
and we understand it. We see in our mind's eye the 
meaning, rather than the present shade of the color. 
One can convince himself that he has gone far beyond 
present experience in such a case by pulling up a handful 
of grass and holding it in the line of vision, and thus 
helping himself by contrasting the two experiences of 
color to discover what is the real color of the remote 
field. Or by an examination of some landscape painting, 
you may convince yourself that the artists have known 
this fact about colors for a long time. If they wish to 
bring up in your mind a distant object of any kind, they 
tone down its colors and darken the shade, and you see 
it, not as mere color, but as alive with meaning. 

Perhaps some of the best illustrations with which 
to make clear this fact that we fill out all our lives 
with meanings, are the illustrations in which we find 
men attaching the wrong meaning to experiences. One 
walks out on a dark night and sees the fleeting, shifting 
darks and shades. What infinite possibility of ghostly 
interpretation if one is only disposed to read meanings 
into what he sees ! Indeed, I think much of the mystery 
which men have been wont to read into their environ- 
ments may well be dwelt upon as showing how much of 
harm as well as of good may be accomplished by this 
habit of ours of looking for the meanings beyond our 
impressions. 

The ancient priests knew well how to furnish to 
the minds of the ignorant people the impressions out 
of which they could develop the weirdest meanings. 



44 GENETIC PSYCHOLOGY FOR TEACHERS 

Suppose you did not know anything about the modern 
stereopticon, with its projection of pictures and scenes 
in more than life size. Suppose that on some night, or 
in the shrouding darkness of a temple, you should be 
confronted with the outlines of a face projected by sucli 
a stereopticon. What would you see? You would see 
with your eye nothing but a flat image. But your ac- 
tive mind would not stop there. You would enlarge 
upon that image in the only terms that could possibly 
suggest themselves to your mind, ignorant as we have 
assumed it to be of the projecting stereopticon. You 
would literally see a real thing. If you will follow out 
that line of reasoning, you can understand much of the 
deception practised by the ancient priests. They knew 
how to project images, not as we do with the stereopticon 
through a glass lens, but by means of metallic mirrors, 
especially by means of concave mirrors, which are fair 
substitutes for the lenses which we use. For a screen, 
these priests used the smoke rising from sacrifices, or 
they used the temple walls. These served very well in 
place of our sheets of canvas. The people, ignorant of 
all the machinery back of the image, saw the projec- 
tions as visiting deities, and the trick is explained. 

It is interesting to read some of the accounts. Thus, 
in the following we can fairly see the priests getting 
their image into focus before the gaping multitude. It 
is an accoimt given by Damascius. He writes: "In 
a manifestation that ought not to be revealed, there ap- 
peared on the wall of a temple a mass of light, which at 
first seemed remote; it transformed itself in coming 
nearer into a face, evidently divine, of a severe aspect, 
but mixed with gentleness and extremely beautiful." 



HOW EXPERIENCES CONSOLIDATE 45 

An account by the Italian, Cellini, of one of his 
experiences is amusing in its transparent simplicity. 
Cellini relates that he became acquainted with a Sicilian 
priest, skilled in necromancy, and asked the priest to 
impart some of his knowledge. The priest said that 
the man must be of a resolute and steady temper who 
enters upon the study of the black arts. Cellini goes 
on to say: " I replied that I had fortitude and resolu- 
tion enough if I could but find an opportunity. The 
priest answered, ' If you think you have the heart to 
venture, I will give you all the satisfaction you can de- 
sire.' Thus we agreed. The priest, one evening, pre- 
pared to satisfy me, and desired me to look out for two 
companions. Having secured two of my intimate ac- 
quaintances, we resorted at night to the Colosseum, and 
there the priest began to draw circles on the ground with 
the most impressive ceremonies imaginable. He 
brought with him several precious perfumes and fire, 
with some compositions also which diffused noisome 
odors. As soon as he was in readiness, he made an open- 
ing in one of the circles, and, taking us by the hand, led 
us in, at the same time ordering his partner to throw 
perfumes into the fire. The ceremonies lasted about 
an hour and a half. There appeared several legions of 
devils, insomuch that the amphitheater was quite filled 
with them. The priest requested me to stand resolutely 
by him, because the legions were now about a thousand 
more in number than he had designed, and besides were 
most dangerous. My companions were in a terrible 
fright, and even the priest trembled with fear, endeav- 
oring by mild and gentle methods to dismiss the spirits 
in the best way he could. The priest entreated us to 



46 GENETIC PSYCHOLOGY FOR TEACHERS 

have good heart and take care to burn the proper per- 
fumes. Though I was as much terrified as any of them, 
I did my utmost to conceal the terror I felt." Does it 
need any comment to make it clear that the smoking 
incense was necessary to serve as a screen for the dancing 
spirits, that the circles on the ground were necessary to 
keep the visitors in proper range, and that the attending 
terror of the whole occasion augmented powerfully the 
natural tendency to see a real being in each shadowy 
phantom? 

Do not fail to keep in mind the general fact which 
all of these examples are intended to illustrate. The 
general fact is that the character of any mental process 
depends, not merely upon the immediately present fac- 
tors, but also, and very largely, upon what one sees 
beyond the given factors as the remoter meaning. This 
fact that we add meaning to all of our experiences is 
one of special importance to our teacher-study. It is 
very easy to overlook it from the point of view of 
ordinary experience. The common man wishes to gain 
complete knowledge of any object. This he desires 
without particular reference to the question of what 
is presented and what is seen as meaning. Now and 
then, in certain exceptional cases, even the ordinary 
man becomes interested in the difference between 
presented fact and interpretation. This is the case 
when he has to sit on a Jury and compare the testi- 
mony of two or more witnesses for the purpose of 
discovering exactly what it was that presented itself 
to the eyes of each observer, and what each added 
in the way of perfectly honest private interpretation 
of meaning. In such a case the ordinary man is, like 



HOW EXPERIENCES CONSOLIDATE 47 

ourselves, interested in the question of meaning versus 
impression. 

Tlie teacher's interest is not quite tlie same as that 
of the juror, but is very closely related to it. The 
teacher wants to know what parts of a given experience 
which he and the child are having at a given stage in 
any study, are really common to both. If he could 
sharply distinguish in his own experience that which is 
added meaning from that which is immediately pre- 
sented impression, he would be better able to understand 
that he and the child may be looking at the same object, 
and yet be having vastly different experiences. 

The illustration that comes first to mind is, of course, 
the illustration of the new word. I remember the first 
time I heard the words Ornithorliynclius paradoxus. 
They were spoken by a teacher who knew what they 
meant, and his whole thought was doubtless off in Aus- 
tralia, where there is an interesting animal bearing that 
name. What was my state of mind? The name had a 
sort of impressive sound for me, which I dare say my 
teacher was not noticing at all. I thought that name 
over as a kind of mouth-filling combination of rather 
melodious noises and nothing more. My teacher and I 
were in the presence of the same experience, so far as 
the immediately given factors were concerned, but he 
had the meaning, and I had only the sound. 

It is not merely words, however, as common as they 
are in our school life, which illustrate the absence of 
meaning on the one side and its presence on the other. 
Did you ever go with some intelligent teacher of an- 
atomy to examine his museum? Did you ever notice 
how every ugly bone and jar grows eloquent with inter- 



48 GENETIC PSYCHOLOGY FOR TEACHERS 

est when lie begins to let you into the secrets of what he 
sees in those specimens ? And did you ever note by con- 
trast how barren and commonplace a museum is when 
you are left to wander about by yourself, with your 
ideas tied down to the little that can be seen in the 
merely present fact? 

The ability to add meanings to impressions is al- 
ways a mark of extended experience. The teacher dif- 
fers from the pupil in the larger degree of ability to see 
meaning in the objects about him. The expert has a 
greater range of interpretation than has the novice. 
Everywhere, richer meanings grow up with fuller ex- 
periences. One may almost define what we have been 
calling the meaning of impressions by saying that these 
meanings are past experiences brought over into the 
present. Thus, when one sees a dark blue on the dis- 
tant horizon and knows that it means a green field, this 
recognition of meaning is due to the fact that on some 
previous occasion a dark color has grown brighter and 
lighter as one has walked toward it. In other words, 
the present impression has meaning because in some 
past time we discovered the meaning of a similar im- 
pression. The richness of present interpretations will, 
accordingly, depend on the degree in which one has 
profited by past experiences, and there is a very large 
justification for the statement that education consists in 
the process of adding meanings to given impressions. 

Such a definition of education as that which has 
been offered, requires some further explanation before 
it can be accepted as entirely safe. Not all meanings 
are desirable additions to present impressions. Thus, 
when the savage learns that an eclipse means the wrath 



HOW EXPERIENCES CONSOLIDATE 49 

of some avenging diety, he has doubtless, in one sense 
of the word, had an enlargement of experience, but he 
lias hardly been improved, or even educated, in the 
best sense of the word. What he needs for his education 
is not merely the addition of meaning to his impression, 
but the addition of a correct and productive meaning. 
And just here is the indefinitely large problem: What 
meanings are correct and productive as additions to 
given impressions? Here is the serious side of the 
teacher's task. Be sure, as you face your pupils with a 
new impression, that they will soon attach some mean- 
ing to it. Your problem is to find out what the impres- 
sion is, and what is the appropriate meaning. Your 
next problem is to discover what conditions are most 
favorable to the establishment of proper meanings, in- 
stead of false meanings, in the minds of these pupils. 
And, finally, your constant task must be to discover 
what meanings are growing fixed in your pupils' 
thoughts, and to guard most jealously these growing 
processes, and by constant supervision to see to it that 
only productive meanings grow undisturbed. 

Since this matter of the meanings which are at- 
tached to impressions is of such importance for our 
scientific study of the teacher and the teacher's work, 
it is worth while for us to dwell upon the nature of these 
added meanings at some length. And the lesson which 
one must learn at the very outset of this study and 
must keep in mind all along, is the lesson which has 
already been taught by our examples, but can never be 
too fully emphasized, namely, the lesson that it is one 
of the most difficult tasks in the world to know in any 
given case what is meaning and what is impression. 
4 



50 GENETIC PSYCHOLOGY FOR TEACHERS 

There are certain cases in which impression and 
added factors are sufhciently separate so that any one 
can easily discern both of them. Thus, we have all had 
the experience of meeting some person whom we have 
met once or twice before and whom we have nearly for- 
gotten. We have to search in the remote corners of our 
minds for some stray fact which will guide us in what 
to say and how to treat the person. Perhaps the earlier 
experience was agreeable, and with a faint recollection 
of that in mind, we try now to renew the pleasant rela- 
tions. We are all the time very conscious of the fact 
that past experiences are being revived to aid us in un- 
derstanding and dealing with the present. In other 
words, we are conscious of the fact that the interpreting 
meanings which should come out of the past and illu- 
minate the present, are separate from the immediate 
impression. We recognize in our effort to remember, 
that the process of finding some of the remoter mean- 
ings of the face and voice are different from the immedi- 
ate impressions. 

Turn from this stranger to your familiar friend. 
To be sure, the present impression is again nothing but 
a face and a voice; but these are now no meaningless 
visual and auditory impressions. The face and the voice 
are full of rich significance. You know just how to 
act, and you have that comfortable feeling of familiar- 
ity that comes from a clear and full knowledge of the 
meaning of your impression. The meaning comes so 
easily in this case that we do not think of it as separate 
from the impression. We do not say that we remember 
our intimate friends — we say that we recognize them, 
thereby indicating that in this case meaning and im- 



. HOW EXPERIENCES CONSOLIDATE 51 

pressions arise together. To be sure, the meaning never 
could have appeared if it had not grown up in past ex- 
perience, but at this stage of development it is not 
referred back to the past at all. It is not a memory, it 
is a present fact. Let us call it a present meaning, in 
order to distinguish it from something remembered and 
dragged into the present out of the past. Present 
meaning and memory are, then, two different forms in 
which experience gets itself added to present impres- 
sions. Memory is the more obvious case of enlarging 
upon our impressions; present meaning is the more com- 
mon and the more important case. 

Let me impress upon you the difference between 
present meaning and memory by means of an illustra- 
tion which was furnished to me by a friend. He feels a 
very strong dislike for horses. He can not bear to come 
near a horse's head. This is, as you readily see, a way 
of looking at the horse which differs radically from the 
way in which most of us look at that animal. My 
friend's interpretation is that the animal is harmful, to 
be avoided, and thoroughly disagreeable. For a long 
time he said this peculiar personal attribute toward 
horses remained a mystery to him. No memory served 
to show him how he had acquired this sort of a present 
meaning. He knew he differed from most people whom 
he saw liking and admiring horses, but that was not 
enough to dissuade him from his view; for him horses 
were and are thoroughly distasteful factors of experi- 
ence. He confided his feelings to an uncle one day, and 
received from the uncle the information which cleared 
up the whole matter. When he was a boy he had been 
bitten by a horse. That experience had left its mark 



52 GENETIC PSYCHOLOGY FOR TEACHERS 

on his future interpretations of horse nature, not in the 
form of memory, for the incident was entirely forgot- 
ten, but in the form of a thoroughly established mean- 
ing. To-day he looks at horses as that experience led 
him to know horses; but all he has carried away for 
his mental life is the meaning of the event, not the 
actual memory image. 

Each of us has had similar experiences, though per- 
haps less clearly defined. Have you never taken a 
strong dislike to some one you have just met? Have 
you not read into his face or manner all sorts of dis- 
agreeable traits? And then have you not suddenly 
realized, as an explanation of the whole interpretation 
in which you have been indulging, that this man looks 
like some one you knew in the past? In other words, 
you have been disliking him because your experience 
has been such that these special features which he ex- 
hibits, mean something unpleasant to you. Notice that 
in such a case your recognition of present meaning could 
not depend on memory, for the memory came after the 
interpretation. The meaning is explained by your re- 
calling after a time some special face in your past expe- 
rience which has helped to establish the meaning, but 
the interpretation was something different from the ex- 
planation afforded by memory. The interpretation is 
immediate and definite; memory follows in such a case 
far behind. If there are cases in which tardy memory 
arrives to explain our sudden interpretations, how many 
cases are there, do you suppose, in which the interpreta- 
tion goes forward in the same way but is not explained at 
all? I think a careful analysis of experience would go to 
show that our lives are made up of interpretations that 



HOW EXPERIENCES CONSOLIDATE 53 

are so settled and fixed that the memory factors which 
would explain them are long since dispensed with. 

Indeed,. there are some cases in which memory can 
not be invoked at all in the explanation of our present 
meanings, and yet these meanings are the results of 
past experience. Take the illustrations with which we 
opened this discussion, the illustrations of ordinary 
hearing and seeing, and the demonstration of the utility 
of two ears and two eyes. When one hears a sound in 
the two ears and receives in so doing, impressions of 
such a character that the sensation on one side is 
stronger than the sensation on the other side, he inter- 
prets the location of the source of the sound on the 
basis of the difference in intensity of the sensations in 
the two ears. This may be stated in other words as 
an interpretation of the meaning of the experiences 
brought to him by the two ears. If you will watch an 
infant you will see that the infant does not interpret 
the meanings of sounds in any such successful fashion. 
Indeed, one need not go as far back as infancy. 
An experimenter ^ has recently demonstrated that 
adults may, through experience, improve very notice- 
ably in their ability to locate sounds. This shows that 
adults may become more expert in the interpretation 
of the meanings of their impressions. What is this proc- 
ess of growing expert in interpretation? Certainly it 
is not cultivating memory. We do not say to our- 
selves, this sound in the right ear means the same kind 
of sounding body as that which we experienced yester- 
day. Indeed, as we have already pointed out, we do 

^ Professor Pierce, in Studies in Space Perception, p. 98 et seq. 



54 GENETIC PSYCHOLOGY FOR TEACHERS 

not even distinguish the two sounds in the two ears as 
separate. Experience has grown up in these cases by a 
kind of blind process of trial. The infant or the devel- 
oping adult does not so much think about meanings, 
as he tries to fit himself in a practical way to the impres- 
sions. Sometimes he fails to fit himself to the impres- 
sion, and suffers the consequences; sometimes he suc- 
ceeds, and enjoys the advantages. Thus he accumulates 
certain habits of turning in the right direction, not be- 
cause he knows why, but because his best and most 
satisfactory experiences are those which resulted in 
movement in a certain direction in response to a certain 
combination of impressions. It is this method of blind 
accumulation of habits of interpretation which gives 
us, for example, the present meaning of water when we 
are swimming, or of a turn in the path when we are 
riding a bicycle. No memory is needed, for the mean- 
ing in this case is recognized as a demand for a form 
of immediate activity and has grown up by personal 
effort. 

Or take again the illustration of seeing with two 
eyes. When we see a little more of the right side of an 
object with the right eye, and a little more of the left 
side of an object with the left eye, we are not surprised. 
We do not have to refer back to past experience for 
some explanation. We have had such experiences thou- 
sands and thousands of times every day, and the result 
is we have a ready-made form of interpretation. We 
know what that means. It means a solid object. So 
fixed is this mode of interpretation, that if we persuade 
ourselves to look into a stereoscope, we must interpret 
those pictures in terms similar to our ordinary experi- 



HOW EXPERIENCES CONSOLIDATE 55 

ence. "\Ye see in the stereoscoiDe a single solid image, 
not what is really there, namely, two flat pictures. 

Our minds are thus constantly seeing in present im- 
pressions their meanings. These meanings are the 
results of past experiences, but they do not depend in 
any great number of cases on any clearly recognized 
reference to remembered experiences. You look into 
a mirror, for example, and you are performing an act 
of double interpretation. In the first place, you see the 
object straight ahead of you, back of the mirror. This 
experience is due to a fixed mode of interpreting 
experiences which if formulated would lead to a state- 
ment of the general principle: light has traveled in 
straight lines in a sufficiently large number of past ex- 
periences so that one is safe in interpreting present 
cases in the belief that it is always true that light travels 
in this way. It is hardly necessary to point out that 
no one ever does, in ordinary life, formulate such a 
principle as the basis of locating objects in mirrors. 
Indeed, no one ever thinks about his past experiences 
in any explicit way. Past experiences have been boiled 
down into a very safe and practical habit of interpre- 
tation. We see objects straight ahead. But now notice 
the interesting fact that our interpretation of objects 
seen in mirrors goes further than this. We have, as I 
said a moment ago, a double interpretation. If we see 
the frame of the mirror, or if we recognize the presence 
of the mirror in any way, we know enough about mir- 
rors to interpret our mirror object as a reflection, not a 
real object. We interpret the light as coming from 
straight ahead, but we interpret it as coming from what 
we know through experience to be an image rather than 



56 GENETIC PSYCHOLOGY FOR TEACHERS 

a thing. A savage does not have this added experience 
which enables us to interpret our experiences in mirrors 
as images. He takes the image for a real object. We 
do the same when we fail to notice the mirror. In both 
these latter cases the interpretation is not double; it is 
simple, and based on the more common fact that in all 
our past experience light comes in straight lines and 
from real objects. 

I hope these illustrations have made it clear to you 
that present meanings are not identical with memories. 
Our way of looking at things is indeed the product of 
past experiences, Ijut past experiences are not repro- 
duced in full in the vast majority of our interpreta- 
tions. Past experiences are worked over, epitomized, 
condensed, or whatever you please to call it, if you will 
only recognize that our modes of getting at present 
meanings are wonderfully economical means of guiding 
us. They bring all the past into our present lives, sifted 
and arranged for immediate use. 

Indeed, if you will consider carefully you will see 
that such condensation is just as important a condition 
for progress as is retention. Suppose every time we 
were confronted with an impression, we had to go 
through a long process of passing in review in mem- 
ory all the related facts out of our past. We should 
never progress. It is because we do not have to carry 
the useless parts of this past into the future, because 
we have the power of selecting and appropriating what 
we need, that we can profit by past experiences without 
being burdened with the experiences in full. 

If we may borrow an illustration from the life of 
a nation, we may say that history is the nation's mem- 



HOW EXPERIENCES CONSOLIDATE 57 

ory of itself. History aims to bring up the past as 
fully and accurately as possible. It will expend its 
highest energy in the effort to reach completeness and 
fidelity. If you would learn, on the other hand, what 
are the experiences from which the nation has profited, 
what are the lessons it has carried over into a condensed 
and immediately useful form, then you must study the 
present institutions and the life of its people. Our 
thought, for example, of what an executive head of a 
nation should be, is expressed in our President. Our 
President is, to be sure, at the same time an expression 
of what our fathers, trained under kings of Europe, 
thought an executive should and should not be; but 
the chief office of our nation is not an historical record, 
it is a present institution, an embodied result of con- 
densed experience. It is understood and appreciated 
in our national life to-day, not because of its reference 
backward, but because of its present value and utility. 
In an analogous way our understanding of a familiar 
word, such as the word danger, for example, is not due 
to memory of Avhat that word has been known to mean 
in the past. When one hears the word danger shouted 
behind him, he begins to get out of the way. The word 
with its meaning is a living, present factor in his life, 
with present meaning and rich content. Experience has 
entered into the word, of course. You might shout 
" Danger! " behind an infant indefinitely and the 
chances are you would get a smile as return for your 
precautions. But though the meaning of the word 
danger has been learned through experience, one's pres- 
ent knowledge of that meaning is not to be described 
as memory; it is much more direct, and therefore much 



58 GENETIC PSYCHOLOGY FOR TEACHERS 

more useful; it is what we have called present mean- 
ing. 

When we compare memory and present meaning, 
we find that present meaning is usually the result of 
more extended development than is found in cases of 
memory. Thus in the illustration which we used some 
time ago, of the mental processes which arise in the 
cases of meeting a comparatively new acquaintance and 
of meeting a familiar friend, memory is evidently drawn 
upon in the case of the new acquaintance, because suffi- 
cient experience for direct interpretation is not yet ac- 
quired. So also in learning new words. One has to go 
through the memory period in order to reach the inter- 
pretation period. This is especially obvious when one 
tries to learn a foreign language. One finds it necessary 
to stop and think of meanings, to recall slowly and 
laboriously what he has learned. In later, fuller ac- 
quaintance with words, one will become freer and freer 
from the necessity of remembering. Spencer has stated 
this fact in regard to memory and interpretation very 
clearly in his Principles of Psychology,^ where he writes : 
" Memory, then, pertains to that class of psychical 
states which are in process of being organized. It con- 
tinues so long as the organization of them continues, 
and disappears when the organization of them is com- 
plete." 

One might spend a long time dwelling upon the 
importance of this statement of Spencer for educational 
practise. If it be true that memory is a stage of incom- 
plete mental development, that there is a higher and 

1 Vol. i, p. 453. 



HOW EXPERIENCES CONSOLIDATE 59 

more perfect form of organization beyond memory, then 
the fact must be recognized as important for school 
work. Certain it is that school work has no right to 
stop when it has trained memory. It must go on to the 
higher stage, which we have called recognition of pres- 
ent meanings. 

There is, however, a much more significant question 
about the relation between memory and interpretation 
than this which we have answered by saying with 
Spencer, that memory, when it is present, is an incom- 
plete phase of development. The question which our 
present-day education is most eagerly asking is this. 
How far is there any real need of memory in giving 
present meanings? May we not pass to present mean- 
ings, it is asked, with much greater directness? Some 
of us are not asking this question in words, perhaps, but 
we are asking it in a practical way when we try to re- 
duce to a minimum the memory work in our daily 
teaching of the children. Can we get along with less 
memory, asks one teacher, when he does not spend much, 
or even any, time in repeating the multiplication table. 
Can we get along without the greater part of memory 
drill, asks another teacher, when he says he would 
rather develop power in his pupils to deal with expe- 
riences as they rise, than cultivate memory of any num- 
ber of facts which can not be put into immediate use. 
And so on through the whole list of modern educational 
reforms, we find this question of memory versus direct 
interpretation, one of the most vital questions in all 
our thinking and teaching. 

It is a question which certainly deserves discussion 
from the point of view of the teacher's own mental life 



60 GENETIC PSYCHOLOGY FOR TEACHERS 

as well as from the point of view of the teacher's work. 
How much of our training in methods of teaching, for 
example, do we owe to memory, and how much do we 
owe to what we like to call tact or spontaneous power 
of dealing with situations when they arise? I hardly 
need to remind you that the common answer to this 
question in regard to the training of teachers is, like 
the common answer to the question in regard to the 
training of children, much in favor of direct ability 
to interpret and control rather than in favor of mem- 
ory. So from all points we come to the question. How 
can direct interpretation be gained with the least pos- 
sible delay, with the least lingering at the lower level of 
memory? 

There need be no hesitation in giving the answer 
to this question. The amount of memory drill necessary 
in order to secure immediate interpretation is reduced 
just in the ratio in which practical and immediate con- 
tact with impressions is increased. Direct handling is 
the great means of training by which we can obviate 
the necessity of memory work. The method of learning 
what things are by using them, is so distinctly the mod- 
ern method of learning that we all understand its car- 
dinal virtues. Some of the games which we learn almost 
entirely by practise, and hardly at all by precept, are 
perhaps the best illustrations of the avoidance of mem- 
ory work in adult education. If one wants to learn 
tennis, for example, he commonly goes out and tries to 
hit the ball. When he succeeds, it is due to the fact 
that he has tried a variety of ways of reaching the ball 
and has finally found the right response to his present 
impression. Success is in a measure the result of past 



HOW EXPERIENCES CONSOLIDATE 61 

failures, and certainly each success will lead to a higher 
level of proficiency in the future. But one does not 
remember in any great degree these various experiences 
which perfect his ability as a tennis player. He just 
keeps on trying, each time coming a little nearer to 
what he regards as a satisfactory degree of proficiency. 
Again, consider the experience of learning to ride a 
bicycle, which is much like that of playing tennis. 
Other examples are, learning to swim, learning some 
trick of manual dexterity, such as tying a complex 
knot. In all these cases one learns by trying. Each 
experience is incorporated at once into present mean- 
ing, the useless parts of the experience being dropped 
on the spot, and only that which is thoroughly assimi- 
lated being carried away. That is, if the trial is not 
successful it is rejected, and just in so far as it is suc- 
cessful it is retained as a present mode of acting in a 
given situation. The last and most successful move- 
ment is recorded in such cases, not in memory images, 
but in the form of an acquired habit. 

Memory is not needed in the cases we have been 
discussing, because memory would carry forward too 
much. If memory shows itself at all in such cases, it 
is usually in the very undesirable form of a haunting 
recollection of some disastrous failure, which contrib- 
uted to education only in the most remote and negative 
way. That the final successful movements are not re- 
tained in memory, you can make yourself realize by try- 
ing to tell somebody else how you performed the suc- 
cessful move. For example, try to explain how you tie 
a knot, and see how little is retained in memory. On 
the other hand, the habit never fails, in spite of your 



62 GENETIC PSYCHOLOGY FOR TEACHERS 

inability to recall how you acted the last time and the 
time before. In the presence of proper conditions of 
string and free ends you feel that " warmth and famil- 
iarity " of experience which marks it in your mind as 
an experience which you can easily and directly inter- 
pret and manage. 

One can avoid memory work through training in the 
use of things. This is the observation which experi- 
ence forces upon us at all points, and this is the principle 
that our modern education is so eagerly taking up in all 
departments — in the kindergarten, in the constructive 
work of the elementary schools, in manual training, and 
in the laboratory work of our high schools and colleges. 
Learn by use, learn by doing, and you shall have fol- 
lowed the shortest route to recognition of present, prac- 
tical meanings. 

And now I believe that we have said what there is 
to be said in favor of making present meanings the goal 
of mental development. We have, up to this point, 
shown our willingness to join the ranks of those who 
are striving to improve modern education by making it 
less a matter of mere recollection of earlier experiences. 
It is time, after all this emphasis of immediate training 
in present meanings, to point out some of the limitations 
of this sort of training, and to say something in favor 
of a rational form of memory work; for while we should 
be ready to correct the abuse of memory work in the 
schools, we should never be so far absorbed in this cam- 
paign against memory work as to try to put entirely 
out of the schools all forms of memory training. Mem- 
ory work rightly planned and carried out certainly has 
a place in our school life, and there is danger in our 



HOW EXPERIENCES CONSOLIDATE 63 

modern pedagogy that we shall be too radical, and shall 
lose some of the great advantages that come from the 
cultivation of indirect, memory interpretation. 

The great limitation set upon the value of training 
that includes no memory is that it is inflexible. Imme- 
diate interpretation without memory is the mechanical 
side of thought. It proceeds on its way without varia- 
tions. Let me illustrate this by referring again to 
such forms of interpretation as one has when he looks 
into a mirror. In past experiences the light has so 
regularly traveled in straight lines that we have a 
fixed mode of interpretation. This mode of interpre- 
ting light, either never had an immature memory stage, 
or else it very soon passed beyond memory. It is as 
immediate and complete as any form of recognition of 
meaning possibly could be. Notice that it does not ad- 
mit of change even when we know, as in the case of a 
mirror, that the conditions are changed. We avoid 
inconvenience in dealing with mirrors by superimposing 
upon the original fixed mode of interpretation a sec- 
ondary, or added clause of interpretation, adapted to 
mirrors as special factors of experience. In other words, 
we do not attempt to change the first mode of interpre- 
tation at all. We let it stand as fixed and safe for most 
purposes, and simply say to ourselves that it is, after 
all, not true that the object is back there as we see it in 
the mirror, that as a matter of fact the object in this 
case is around an angle. 

The fixity of our interpretation of the direction in 
which light travels would also get us into trouble if we 
had to deal very frequently with objects under water; 
for, as you know, a ray of light is bent in passing from 



6J: GENETIC PSYCHOLOGY FOR TEACHERS 

water into air. But here, too, it is easier for us to 
think our way through such unusual cases than to 
modify our general mode of interpretation. We see 
objects which are partly under water and partly above 
the water as if they were bent, but we do not disturb 
ourselves on this account; we have learned to hold in 
memory the correction that objects are not bent as they 
seem to be. We thus make our interpretation by addi- 
tion, not by any modification of the fixed form of ordi- 
nary perception. 

Eelatively fixed modes of interpretation which have 
passed more or less completely beyond the memory 
stage — that is, beyond the possibility of modification- — 
are more common than most of us realize. Such rela- 
tively fixed modes of interpretation are not always as 
unchangeable as is our mode of interpreting the direc- 
tion from which light comes into the eye. They are 
sometimes capable of change under very strong provo- 
cation, but the provocation must be indeed great. Thus, 
most of the people we deal with are fixed, so far as 
our estimate of them is concerned. It would take a 
great deal to induce us to think well of some people or 
ill of others. Even if a man whom we do not like does 
a good thing, we refuse to see it as good. Our mode 
of interpretation is too fixed. Political faith is prover- 
bially fixed. If one is a stanch partizan he will see 
things in a way appropriate to his partizan interests, 
and arguments avail little to change him. In matters 
of social practise, in matters of taste, and even in 
matters of religion, we find ourselves fixed and im- 
movable, and our grounds for being fixed passed so 
long ago out of memory that we can not give an 



HOW EXPERIENCES CONSOLIDATE G5 

account of the origin of the mode of looking at things 
which we now adopt. 

If you will study the way in which, one of these 
fixed habits of interpretation begins to break up when 
the sufficient provocation arises, you will see the value 
of memory. Some fact presents itself which refuses to 
be interpreted in the old way. If in such a case one 
can by recollection call up the grounds of the fixed 
mode of interpretation, he may place the new fact along- 
side of the older considerations and may formulate a 
new and broader mode of interpretation. Have you not 
heard some wise political orator saying to a stubborn 
audience of opponents: " Let us consider why you be- 
long to your party. Do you not remember how your 
father was a member of that party, and how it did thus 
and so in the good old days? Ask yourselves whether 
it is doing the same to-day." What is our political ora- 
tor doing? He is putting us back at the beginnings of 
this political faith of ours. He knows very well how 
difficult it is to readjust the fixed habit of mature inter- 
pretation, even when readjustment is needed, and he 
knows also how much easier change will be if he can 
bring us back to the beginnings of this mode of thought. 
In short, he is playing upon the variable element of 
our mental natures, and that variable element is mem- 
ory as opposed to fixed interpretation. Memory is char- 
acteristic, as Spencer put it, of those psychical proc- 
esses which are in the stage of formation. If you can 
get at the memory stage of interpretation you can 
change it. 

I suppose you are already asking yourselves the ques- 
tion to which our discussion has now brought us: Is it 
5 



66 GENETIC PSYCHOLOGY FOR TEACHERS 

advisable in the course of education to keep any of tlie 
modes of interpretation open to the possibility of easy 
revision? The ans^ver to that question can hardly be 
anything but an emphatic Yes. There are a very large 
number of interpretations which need constant revi- 
sions. Thus, every time a pupil passes from an elemen- 
tary stage of a science to an advanced stage, there must 
be a readjustment of ideas. For example, in passing 
from the arithmetical to the algebraic methods of deal- 
ing with the number idea, a very great enlargement of 
the number idea must take place. The transition from 
physics to its applications in mechanical engineering, 
is another illustration of a more practical type. Our 
social ideas very often need readjusting. Take, for ex- 
ample, all our habits of thought about our fellow 
men. Take our political interpretations. I remember 
an old fellow in the country where a part of my boy- 
hood was spent who had voted the ticket of one party 
all his life. On one occasion a friend of his in the 
opposing party was nominated for some petty local 
office. The old hardshell worked faithfully for his 
friend until election day, and then the habit of 
thought and action of a lifetime was too much for 
him, and he went to the polls and voted against his 
friend, whom he recognized as after all out of the true 
fold. Such an example as that illustrates, more elo- 
Cjuently than could any argument, the necessity of keep- 
ing one's modes of thought ready for revision. If you 
want to avoid becoming a fossil in any line, keep the 
reasons for 5"our habits of thought sufficiently fresh in 
memory to make it possible to reconsider them from 
time to time. 



HOW EXPERIENCES CONSOLIDATE 67 

Take the questions of how teachers shall arrange 
their work for the class room, and what their methods 
of instruction shall be. Have you not seen teachers 
who hare thought in certain ruts with such regularity 
every time a certain subject was presented, that they have 
become petriiied? G-iven a boy of twelve, a problem 
in percentage and a blackboard, and such a teacher can 
not see or expect more than one result, and that result 
must come in a perfectly fixed, definite way. If some 
one comes from some other school and says that this 
method is not rigbt, what can our teacher with the 
fixed mode of thought do? ISTothing. He does not re- 
member now why he adopted the method. It is fixed, 
that is all there is of it; new methods are not wanted. 

Mark you, I do not say that every time some one 
comes to you with a new method you should adopt it. 
What I do say is, that if you want to keep yourself from 
getting into bad ruts, you must be intelligent about 
what you do and about what you think; and the. way 
to be intelligent is to be able to remember why you do, 
and think, as you do. Pedagogy is little if anything 
more than a means of waking a teacher up to the impor- 
tance of understanding his or her own modes of thought 
and action. "WTiy does a child mean this or that to you? 
What are your reasons for your attitude toward your 
pupils? Why do you think geography is an important 
subject? Why do you use the inductive method? Wliy 
are you prejudiced against manual training? These 
are questions which, if you can not answer, you are a 
slave to blind attitudes of mind. You may even be a fair 
teacher and not depend on anjrthing but these blind 
and thoroughly established modes of thought, but the 



68 GENETIC PSYCHOLOGY FOR TEACHERS 

chances are against you. You should give your habits 
of thought, as I said a moment ago, a periodic looking 
over, and, if necessary, a periodic revision. 

And what is true of teachers and other grown-ups 
is true of children. They can learn to be in a sense 
expert by the mere methods of trial and retrial, by the 
methods of practical manipulation. They can be intel- 
ligently expert, however, only when they add to their 
ability to do things, some knowledge of how things are 
done and why they are done. In the good old days, 
boys were sent out as apprentices, and they learned by 
trial. To-day we give our boys a thorough course, in 
which, if we are wise, we mix with trial some memory 
work. I think that the day is not distant when we shall 
recognize in all departments of our teaching that mem- 
ory work has its large and proper place along with the 
more direct forms of learning. And for ourselves, I 
think we can find, if we study the matter closely, as we 
shall try to do in the next chapter, that many of the 
great difficulties that beset teaching are due to the fact 
that teachers do not try in a practical way to be some- 
thing more than routine teachers; they do not try to 
keep alive their memories and to understand the rea- 
sons for their present modes of looking at their expe- 
riences. 



CHAPTEE III 

THE OEIGIN OF SOME OF OUR EDUCATIONAL IDEALS 

Ix one of his letters, Stevenson sums up the dis- 
couraging side of educational elforts by saying that 
one must keep chopping and chopping and never have 
the satisfaction of seeing the chips fly. What teacher 
has not realized keenly at times this feeling of vague- 
ness and uncertainty as to the effect of class-room and 
school work? We seek to render this uncertainty some- 
what less trying by holding now and then what we call 
tests. We are ready to admit that these periodic tests 
do not give us an entirely satisfactory indication of what 
has been accomplished, but we want to see some of the 
chips flying, and so we get what meager satisfaction we 
can out of examinations. 

How different it is in other callings! The carpenter 
looks over his work as it progresses day by day; the 
merchant takes his inventory and account of stock at 
least once every twelve months; the lawyer knows when 
the verdict comes what has been the effect of his plea; 
the doctor finds his patient better or worse; and so on 
through the whole list of professions and occupations. 
The results are obvious, and they come soon enough to 
serve as guides for new efforts. If this or that method 
of treating a disease does not produce the desired re- 

69 



70 GENETIC PSYCHOLOGY FOR TEACHERS 

suit, the doctor soon knows it and changes; if this or 
that method of advertising is successful, the merchant 
soon finds it out and develops it more fully. With teach- 
ing it is different. We think we have a new and most 
successful method of teaching, and we use it with unre- 
strained enthusiasm, only to find that the children on 
whom the method has been tried are being hindered in 
their general mental development by their special de- 
votion to this one subject. One can not cast up accounts 
in matters of education until that far-off period when 
the boys and girls shall show themselves well or illy 
equipped for life outside of the schools. And even then, 
who shall separate the results of school training from 
the results that grow out of the influence of home 
and social life ? Surely the teacher's task is one in 
which it is not easy to weigh and measure methods and 
results. 

Did you ever consider the effects of this remoteness 
of results on the teacher's conduct and mode of thought? 
Of course we all realize that just because we are not 
brought to a practical test day by day, we are, more 
than most people, open to the temptation of shirking. 
But I do not intend to dwell on that phase of the discus- 
sion. I wish rather to assume that a teacher has un- 
limited devotion and untiring zeal, and to point out 
that even under these conditions, the remoteness of the 
end of education has its marked effect on thought and 
conduct. The best way, perhaps, to describe this effect 
is to say that, deprived of the obvious guides which the 
carpenter, or merchant, or members of other professions 
have, we as teachers are dependent on the ideas which 
we hold as to our aims and purposes. In other words. 



ORIGIN OF SOME OF OUR EDUCATIONAL IDEALS Yl 

we set up as substitutes for unseen and remote ends, a 
variety of theoretical ends. We do something to-day 
and to-morrow, not because we expect to find our efforts 
ripening into immediate fruition, but because our 
thoughts as to what we should accomplish lead us to 
take this step and the next. I think such a line of con- 
sideration as this serves to explain and justify very 
fully the large amount of discussion which educational 
questions are everywhere receiving. Certainly there 
is no profession more in need of good ideals and strong 
ideals than is that to which we belong. 

So necessary, indeed, are ideals to guide the work of 
the teacher, that history is full of illustrations of the 
fact that where no carefully thought-out educational 
ideals have been at hand, the necessary ideals have been 
seized up from this or the other outside source and 
have been made to stand as guides for pedagogical en- 
deavor. 

Let us consider in detail one of the best historical 
illustrations of such borrowing of ideals. Just at the 
beginning of the eighteenth century there grew up in 
the little German city of Halle an educational move- 
ment which was destined to have a far-reaching influ- 
ence on the development of Germany's school systems, 
and indirectly on the development of our own school 
ideals. An enthusiastic professor in the University of 
Halle saw what seemed to him to be the possibility of 
developing a new and more practical form of school 
work. He organized a school for waifs, and attached 
to this general school, a training-school for teachers. 
The results of this movement are still alive in a vigor- 
ous normal institution bearino; the name of the founder 



72 GENETIC PSYCHOLOGY FOR TEACHERS 

of the earlier school, the name of Franke. Franke's 
school made some innovations in the subjects chosen 
for instruction and in the way of teaching these sub- 
jects, but in these innovations we shall not interest 
ourselves now. The fact of chief interest to us here 
is the thoroughgoing application of a certain narrow 
religious ideal which Franke worked out in the organi- 
zation and discipline of his pupils, " Play," said 
Franke, " must be forbidden in any and all of its 
forms. The children shall be instructed in this matter 
in such a way as to show them, through the presenta- 
tion of religious principles, the wastefulness and folly 
of all play. They shall be led to see that play will dis- 
tract their hearts and minds from God, the eternal 
Good, and will work nothing but harm to their spiritual 
lives. Their true joy and hearty devotion should be 
given to their blessed and holy Saviour and not to 
earthly things, for the reward of those who seek earthly 
things is tears and sorrow." 

There is something strangely narrow in that ideal 
which Franke set up for the discipline of his pupils. 
We shall miss the significance of Franke's work, how- 
ever, if we fail to recognize that this was with him a 
true and clear ideal. It did not arise from any careful 
study of children; it did not arise from any broad his- 
torical study of what education had been; it sprang 
rather from a deep religious conviction. It was an ideal 
which the teacher relied upon to guide him in the 
task of preparing his pupils for life here and hereafter. 
It was an ideal which I dare say Franke himself would 
have admitted was beyond the possibility of any imme- 
diate test. Indeed, it was enthusiastically adopted by 



ORIGIN OP SOxME OF OUR EDUCATIONAL IDEALS Y3 

him just because no test was undertaken of the value 
or limitations of play. It was a borrowed educational 
ideal. 

And now that you have seen the narrowness of 
Franke's educational ideal, borrowed from his religious 
beliefs, let me ask you where our own ideals of play 
came from? Or, to relieve the discussion of direct per- 
sonal applications, take the schoolmaster of a genera- 
tion ago; what did he think of play? I remember some 
of my own experiences which lead me to believe that 
if some of my teachers were not inspired by profound 
religious zeal, at least they were inspired from some 
other source, perhaps opposite to that of Franke's in- 
spiration, by prejudice against play equal to that of 
Franke, if not exceeding it. The changes which our 
own ideals of play are undergoing at this very time serve 
to call our attention as teachers most emphatically to 
the prejudice against play so prevalent in the schools 
of yesterday, and give us at the same time good ground 
for the question, Whence came these earlier educational 
ideals, and whence are coming the newer ideals? In 
short, we have here a phase of the large question of the 
teacher's professional ideals. Whence do they arise, 
and what are they? 

Professional ideals are to be distinguished from 
ideals in general. There are some teachers who have 
a kind of schoolroom manner and mode of thought, 
different from the manner and mode of thought which 
they carry into every-day life; these teachers illustrate 
the strength of special ideals adapted only to the pro- 
fessional life of the teacher, and unfortunately they 
illustrate too often the peculiar and narrow character 



74 GENETIC PSYCHOLOGY FOR TEACHERS 

of these siDecial ideals. Professional ideals are not, how- 
ever, always bad. The term " professional " refers to all 
these special ideals about the aims of education which 
Ave as teachers take up from this source or that, and use 
to guide our steps along the by no means obvious path 
of educational work. Very frequently we do not realize 
whence these ideals came, or how appropriate or inap- 
propriate they are as guides. They are like the modes 
of present interpretation of which we spoke in our last 
chapter, always present in developed mental life, but 
frequently so far beyond the memory stage that their 
sources are forgotten and the possibility of changing 
them is very limited. 

Many of our professional ideals are borrowed from 
tradition; such ideals have, in a double sense, passed 
the stage of memory. In the first place, those who 
transmitted the ideals to us have commonly lost sight 
of their first sources; and in the second place, we 
have forgotten in turn whence we drew the tradition^ 
We teach, in short, as we were taught, and we do this 
because it is easier to take up with ready-made ideals 
than it is to make new ideals for ourselves. When some 
educational thinker steps out with a new ideal for the 
school, we all stand back and refuse to have anything 
to do with the new ideal. If we recognize his proposi- 
tion as a call to defend our old views, we find out very 
soon that the justifications for these older views are 
long lost in misty antiquity. The curious fact is, that 
even if we do become convinced of all this, we do not, 
or can not, muster energy enough to reopen the whole 
question and revise our ideals in the light of the new 
facts. Or, at least, to put the case somewhat more 



ORIGIN OF SOME OF OUR EDUCATIONAL IDEALS 75 

mildly ;, the process of revising our ideals is exceedingly 
slow, and requires a generation or two before new tradi- 
tions can grow up. Would that we might have a body 
of teachers so well informed as to the traditions of their 
profession, and so constantly in touch with the helpful 
new considerations, that revisions of educational ideals 
would not be so difficult and tedious! And this is, in 
other words, nothing but a plea for more study by 
teachers of their own ideals and of the grounds of these 
ideals. 

By way of illustration, let us push that question of 
discipline in the school a little further than Ave did in 
our discussion of Franke's methods with his children. 
What is your ideal of good order? Where did it come 
from? I venture to say that we all of us have a notion 
that we are not responsible for the imposition prac- 
tised on children in the schools. This idea, to which 
we cling more or less tenaciously, of making children 
sit in one place for long periods of time, is gradually 
being given up, it is such an ignoble failure. But how 
many generations of children have suffered in the years 
past because of this notion of order, a notion which 
any intelligent mother could have told teachers was, 
to say the least, defective ! 

By way of contrasting other ideals of order with 
our own, it is interesting to know that in the schools of 
Hindustan and of many other Oriental countries, the 
boys are allowed to sway backward and forward and to 
read aloud from their books as they study, each in his 
place. The way in which the teacher picks out the 
good boy there is to select the one who is wiggling most 
energetically and talking to himself the loudest. They 



76 GENETIC PSYCHOLOGY FOR TEACHERS 

have a form of order which agrees with our view that 
doing is essential to the learning process, very much 
better than does our own form of order. 

Even in the old Roman school, from which our 
schools borrowed much, the boys had far greater free- 
dom than in the later medieval schools which followed 
the Roman schools. As Laurie puts it in his history: 
" The pupils seem to have spoken out loud when learn- 
ing, and the masters outshouted them." Our ideal of 
order evidently did not come from this old Roman 
school. 

Furthermore, the changes we are now making show 
that our older ideal did not come from a careful study of 
children and their needs. 

We sometimes try to justify the ideals of rigid order 
by saying that quiet is necessary to concentration of at- 
tention, and bodily repose is necessary to mental activ- 
ity. But all this is shallow fiction. Bodily activity is 
always present in connection with vigorous mental 
activity, as we shall see more in detail in our later dis- 
cussions. Indeed, in children this bodily activity is 
of a very pronounced type. We are coming, as every 
student of present-day education recognizes, to see more 
clearly the necessity and value of proper movement as 
an aid rather than a hindrance to education. And as 
to the necessity of quiet for mental concentration, do 
you think your boys and girls will get quiet when they 
go into the activities of real life? And if not, do you 
think we are preparing them best for life in our quiet 
schoolrooms? 

No; if we are to understand the present organi- 
zation of our schools, we must go back through the cen- 



ORIGIN OF SOME OF OUR EDUCATIONAL IDEALS T7 

turies, stopping for a moment to see how the stern 
Puritans of New England enforced the law that all 
things pertaining to this life are trivial and fit only to 
he eradicated by the schoolmaster. We must pay our 
respects again to Franke and his school; we must go 
back of the Eeformation, with its schools for the people 
conducted on the same plan as the earlier church 
schools. Here in the church schools we have the be- 
ginnings of our modern ideals in more than one particu- 
lar, but in no particular more clearly than in the matter 
of discipline. The medieval schools conducted in con- 
nection with the cloisters were organized on the same 
stern principles as the whole life of those institutions. 
The silent monks, given over to meditation, withdraw- 
ing from the frivolous and untutored world without, 
these were the only schoolmasters of that day. They 
marched to and from the service with bowed head and 
lips moving only in silent prayer or devout hymn. They 
learned the words given them by the authority that pre- 
sided over them. They suffered in confinement and 
with cruel tortures for the slightest infraction of the 
laws under which they lived. All this they thought to 
be necessary in order that they might free their spirits 
from degrading association with the unspiritual body. 
And when they took boys into their cloisters to prepare 
them for intellectual and spiritual life, these zealous 
monks naturally followed in great detail the lines of dis- 
cipline through which they themselves had come to 
their high estate. What did these sequestered monks, 
cut off from all the real life even of their own times, 
know about the child's nature? To them the child 
was nothing but a soul to be saved at any cost of self- 



78 GENETIC PSYCHOLOGY FOR TEACHERS 

sacrifice and mortification of the body. To them any- 
thing which looked like i3lay was a reminder of the vul- 
gar, wicked world outside the cloister walls. To them 
sternness and severe discipline were the only means of 
salvation. And since their day, teachers have gone on 
accepting this false notion of play and school discipline. 
Now and then there have appeared extremists like 
Franke, or like the teachers in the Port Eoyal schools 
in France, or like the Puritans in our own New Eng- 
land — all of whom have tried to be more consistent than 
most of us. These extremists said that if our school 
discipline is right it should be extended so as to cover 
all the hours of the day; no half-hearted compromise 
like ours of half a day of play and half a day of severity 
would do for those eager souls. And then, on the other 
hand, there have been men like Eobert Ascham, who 
have pleaded for humanity and mildness. There have 
been men like Rousseau and Froebel, and a host of 
others, who have said to us in no uncertain terms : Give 
up the harsh and artificial rigor of the school. Bring 
back this, institution to real living and natural enjoy- 
ment, and let us recognize the children's rights of body 
and nervous organization as well as of what we call 
soul. 

The trouble with us as teachers has been in the 
past that we have never waked up to the fact that our 
ideal of order is a mechanical, traditional idea. I am 
not going to say that the new ideal on which we are 
working in our American schools will not contain 
something of the spirit of the old sad-eyed monk's view 
of life. There is some truth to my thinking in that 
medieval idea, carried in those olden days to an extreme 



ORIGIN OF SOME OF OUR EDUCATIONAL IDEALS 79 

and accepted blindly by generations since. But that 
truth must be mixed with other truths. The other 
truths are rushing in upon us in these days. They 
come from child-study, from our study of biology and 
sociology. We are learning the lesson that an act does 
not need to be disagreeable to be virtuous, that pleas- 
ure is compatible with highest effort. And it is possible 
that we are being a little carried away by these dis- 
coveries. If the old monk was a hard master, some of 
our modern schoolmasters have adopted what Professor 
James has so aptly called a '^ soft pedagogy." This 
violent swing from one extreme to the other is due to 
the fact that in neither case is the idea an intelligent 
one. It is adopted blindly from tradition, or it is seized 
up from modern science. Teachers need to become 
more intelligent as to the grounds of their practises. 

If we turn from school discipline to the matter of 
instruction, we come upon a group of traditions that it 
is almost impossible to bring teachers to realize are 
mechanical and often dead. A subject of study gets 
itself petrified very rapidly. One generation learns it 
in school in a certain way, and when that generation 
has grown old enough to be in charge of the work of 
teaching, it is almost impossible to introduce a new ele- 
ment or phase of instruction. If you ask why we teach 
thus and so, you will be confronted with a whole series 
of artificial excuses; the real reason is that we, as the 
older generation, are so fixed in our modes of thouglit 
about the subject in question that we can not realize 
that there is any rational ground for change. 

Take such a question as tliat of the desirability of 
changing the character of geography in the schools. 



80 GENETIC PSYCHOLOGY FOR TEACHERS 

I have seen whole bodies of teachers protesting against 
commercial geography. They have tried to brand com- 
mercial geography as mercenary and materialistic. 
They have tried to point out that there is less exact- 
ness and less discipline in such study than in the minute 
scrutiny of the map which used to be demanded. Such 
teachers would rather locate the most northerly town 
in the State of Maine, than know the way in which 
cotton is gathered and packed for market. They would 
rather mark a pupil down for forgetting that one corner 
of the State of Pennsylvania touches Lake Erie, than 
teach a class how coal is blasted and carried out of the 
mines, or how iron is turned into steel. It is not true 
that these facts of industrial life are unworthy of care- 
ful study in the schools. It is true that the average 
teacher will not arouse himself to revise his notions of 
geography. I venture the remark again, that our teach- 
ers are not so much intelligently opposed to the new 
demands made upon them by the new curriculum as 
they are blindly worried on imaginary grounds. A new 
geography is demanded of them. The traditions of a 
lifetime rise up in rebellion against this innovation. 
Nine times out of ten the teacher begins by feeling im- 
posed upon, and ends by rebelliously thumbing over the 
new requirements, and goes away worrying because the 
new requirements and the old ideals do not agree. 

Which is right, the old ideal of what geography is 
and ought to be, or the new requirement? Again I 
shall venture to formulate the results of observation in 
the statement that probably neither the new require- 
ment nor the old ideal is entirely right. They both 
need careful examination and criticism. They need 



ORIGIN OF SOME OF OUR EDUCATIONAL IDEALS 81 

intelligent study on the part of class-room teachers. 
The trouble in our school systems is that there is not 
enough of this constant comparison in an enlightened 
way, of new demands and old ideals. 

If in a large mercantile house the methods get ever 
so little behind the times, the results show themselves 
in a falling off of profits, and there is a constant spur 
to keep one's eyes open in the observation and study 
of methods. But in the teaching profession there is no 
such constant spur. One may fall years behind and not 
realize it. One may be so blind as to be quite unwilling 
to see even when the new subjects and methods are 
brought to his door. Or one may, if he will, be progress- 
ive, and realizing the character of his own profession 
be his own spur. 

I have used the illustration of geography first, be- 
cause that composite science is so clearly one of the 
storm-centers in our present-day discussions of educa- 
tion. Physical geography on the one side, commercial 
geography on the other; nature-study in all its mani- 
fold departments; political history and social science as 
studies of the human institutions of which geography 
used to give us a glimpse — all these new subjects are 
calling for recognition in a larger measure. These are 
the subjects under which teachers are chafing. What 
shall we do with them? I think there is only one an- 
swer that can be given to this question with any hope of 
bringing about a satisfactory solution. The individual 
teacher must examine for himself the new claims. He 
must bring out his old geographical ideals and prepare 
to understand them. Above all things he must not put 
himself blindly on the defensive. Never hold to an 
6 



82 GENETIC PSYCHOLOGY FOR TEACHERS 

educational ideal as if it were infallible. Eemember 
that it too has real grounds on which to rest, and the 
value of the ideal will depend on the validity of tnese 
grounds. Prepare to know the grounds, that is the 
rational line of defense. Do not turn this task over to 
the superintendent, especially if you have the mental 
reservation that, whatever he concludes, you will hold 
to your old ideals. 

The conflicts between reform and pedantry which 
we have seen so often in our schools, are due to the fact 
that one or both parties to the controversy are unable 
to see back of their particular ideals to the underlying 
justification. 

One could pause and draw from history illustration 
after illustration of how bitter conflicts have been waged 
in breaking up petrified ideals not only in education, 
but in other realms of thought as well. We have a 
kind of admiration for the men who laid down their 
lives for the ideals represented in the crusades, when the 
nations of Europe determined to repossess the Holy 
Sepulcher. And yet, after all, the greatest good accom- 
plished by the crusades was not the protection of 
the medieval religious ideal, but the renovation of 
this ideal. The verdict of history is clear. The cru- 
sades were blind struggles for an imagined and un- 
substantial good. In that struggle the medieval man 
learned the difference between the good to which he 
had falsely held and the real good. One can not read 
that lesson of history aright without applying it to his 
own life. We fight blindly for educational ideals, only 
to find in the course of the struggle that we were per- 
haps partly right, but seldom wholly so. Let us take 



ORIGIN OF SOME OF OUR EDUCATIONAL IDEALS 83 

the lesson as a warning against that kind of defense of 
our educational ideals. Let us do the intelligent thing, 
the rational thing, and before we become militant and 
rush to arms, let us use our minds, which we as teachers 
hold to be the safest guides in life. 

It is hardly in place in a general discussion of the 
teacher's attitude toward the subjects in the curriculum 
to devote much time to the detailed discussion of the 
separate subjects themselves, and I shall recognize that 
limitation of our present opportunity. I shall not 
enter into any defense of nature-study and commercial 
geography, except to repeat an incident which seems 
to me to be full of the kind of meaning which my 
whole argument has tried to convey to you. I once 
had the opportunity of speaking to the teachers of a 
small Ohio city in defense of certain changes which 
had recently been introduced by a new superintendent 
into their course of study. The argument ran some- 
thing like our present argument. The accepted studies 
of our curriculum have not always been the accepted 
studies. Arithmetic was once recognized as valuable 
for school discipline only in so far as it was needed 
to make possible computation of the church calendar. 
Geography of the sailor type is a comparatively recent 
subject. The earlier forms of geography used to be 
more like our present astronomy. And so on, I was 
trying to show how the school course is a gradual 
growth, and was drawing the conclusion that what has 
grown up to its present stage of development must 
be expected to grow further. After that teachers' 
meeting was over an old gentleman came up and said 
to me, " Young man, you might have made your state- 



84 GENETIC PSYCHOLOGY FOR TEACHERS 

ments a little stronger if you had had the experience 
of one as old as I am. I can remember when a young 
New England girl who had come to teach in the school 
which I was attending, introduced a new subject into 
the course of study of that school, and that new sub- 
ject was geography. There was a good deal of excite- 
ment about it in the community and much skepticism 
on the part of the sages as to the propriety of the 
innovation. Especially the teacher in the next district 
was disturbed that the good old traditions of the schools 
thereabouts were thus ruthlessly set aside by that young 
New England girl." I asked the old gentleman what 
the outcome was, and he laughed and said for his 
answer that his daughter was now teaching nature- 
study in the school. 

Of course geographical ideas are not the only ones 
that are getting a renovating these days. We do not 
have to go far into any of the lines of instruction to 
find changes. I shall content myself, however, with 
reference to one of the more general of the proposed 
changes in the course of study. Why is there such op- 
position to the new ideals that are being offered to us 
in the so-called constructive work, or manual-training 
courses in the schools? 

The common attitude toward constructive work 
can be discussed from several points of view. In the 
first place, we may undertake a description of what the 
attitude really is in the mind of the average teacher. 
And here I think we may safely say that most of us 
think of constructive work as a sort of secondary mode 
of training, closely related to pure physical training 
or even to recreation. We seldom find a teacher who 



ORIGIN OP SOME OP OUR EDUCATIONAL IDEALS 85 

would be willing to defend the position that construct- 
ive work is coordinate in importance with reading or 
arithmetic. We usually think of constructive work as 
less intellectual than the other subjects mentioned. We 
think of it as less ennobling, as less characteristically 
human, as less highly developed. Consequently, we 
feel at liberty to neglect constructive work more than 
the other subjects. We do not feel that it is any- 
thing of a stigma upon ourselves when we admit 
freely that we are not able to conduct constructive 
work successfully. If too much of this kind of 
work is demanded of us, we chafe under the require- 
ment and wish for a special teacher to relieve us of 
the work. 

Another point of view from which we might discuss 
constructive work is that of the teacher's equipment. 
Most teachers are not prepared to take up such work. 
They possess no manual dexterity, no knowledge of 
tools and materials, no imagination with which to plan 
such exercises, and worst of all no desire to correct any 
of these limitations. 

Again think of the relation of constructive work 
to our present school organization and equipment. Our 
desks are not adapted to such work. The arrangement 
of our desks in the rooms is not suited to it. The 
supplies ordinarily furnished by boards of education 
do not include the necessary tools or raw materials for 
constructive work. 

Finally, from the point of view of the parents of 
the children, constructive work is not what is expected 
of the schools. I once heard an irate parent sum the 
matter up by saying that his children did not go to 



86 GENETIC PSYCHOLOGY FOR TEACHERS 

school to cut and fold papers or whittle wood — ^tliey 
could do that at home without the help of a teacher. 

Certainly such considerations as these which we 
have been briefly summarizing, show beyond the pos- 
sibility of doubt that constructive work is not a fully 
accepted or willingly accepted innovation in our school 
work. Men may argue as they will at teachers' meet- 
ings and in the educational journals about the advan- 
tages which arise from the introduction of constructive 
work into the school. The simple fact is that most of 
us listen to these arguments in the proverbial fashion, 
with both ears, one ear serving, however, as an exit 
for what comes in at the other. 

Why is it that an average teacher is so prejudiced 
from the outset against constructive work? I find it 
very much more difficult to give a definite answer to 
this question than it was to give an answer to the 
question of the source of our ideals of school discipline. 
The difficulty of accounting for our prejudice against 
constructive work in the schools lies in the fact that 
this is not a prejudice peculiar to teachers. It is so 
wide-spread, I was about to say so universal, and so old, 
that it is impossible to get at the special period when 
it came into the school or even had its origin. The 
fact is that men of all classes have long drawn a sharp 
contrast between bodily activity and mental activity. 
The Hindu devotee who sits in one position year after 
year busy with high and holy thought, the Greek 
laughing at the philosopher so lost in meditation that 
he clumsily falls into the well in his path, the religious 
ascetic of the medieval world who sat and gazed for 
hours and even days into blank space — all these are 



ORIGIN OF SOME OF OUR EDUCATIONAL IDEALS 87 

witnesses to the antiquity of the contrast between bodily 
dexterity and mental activity. 

Taking up the matter from the point of view of 
the science of psychology, especially from the point of 
view of the psychology which has been written by the 
so-called English school, mental life has been treated 
for the most part as if it were made up of impressions 
and of ideas resulting from these impressions. Until 
very recently no one thought it necessary to say very 
much about expression, or the active side of knowl- 
edge. If expression was mentioned at all in the earlier 
psychologies, it was treated as a kind of unessential 
after-effect. Thus we have all of us come to think of 
action as something which one may or may not enter 
upon after he has had a thought. We consider the 
thought as a kind of taking-in process, and as a kind 
of turning over in the mind of what is thus taken in, 
but we have not been in the habit of expecting action 
unless the thought is supplemented by a process quite 
apart from the thought and additional to it. We all 
of us tend even now to believe that one may think 
intently and be perfectly inactive so far as his ex- 
pressive muscles are concerned. In short, the tradition 
of our psychology, both scientific and popular, has been 
that bodily dexterity and mental life are distinct and 
separate. 

I suppose that it will require a generation or two 
of teachers to root up these ideals and to clear the way 
for a new and better ideal in the art of teaching. I 
suppose that the strongest evidence will have very 
little force in assaulting this stronghold of tradition, 
and so I shall feel quite satisfied with the results of 



88 GENETIC PSYCHOLOGY FOR TEACHERS 

my efforts during the remainder of this chapter if I 
can only set you inquiring into the validity of your idea 
as to the relation of mental life and movement. 

In order that there may be no ambiguity as to my 
position in the matter I will say to you frankly at the 
outset that I believe we have been all wrong in this 
matter. I believe we have enough facts now to make 
it perfectly clear that bodily movement is present in a 
very pronounced form whenever there is mental activ- 
ity, and I believe it can be shown that the training of 
this bodily movement is an essential part of the general 
training of the individual. If these beliefs are justified 
by the facts, then the conclusions will not be very diffi- 
cult to draw, our educational ideals are sadly in need 
of revision, and the sooner we can effect this revision 
the sooner we shall undo the harm that has been done 
by accepting a false ideal. 

Let us turn now to a consideration of some of the 
facts which support the statements just made to you. 
There is a very simple experiment which any one can 
easily try. Take two bottles of different sizes, cover 
them so that one can not see what is in them, and 
then put shot into the smaller one until it is exactly 
equal in weight to the larger, empty bottle. Then 
take up the bottles in your hands and you will find that, 
in spite of your knowledge that the two weights are 
the same, the small bottle will seem very much heavier. 
That is, you are subject to what we have already learned 
in another connection to call an illusion. It requires 
no great degree of insight to see in a general way what 
is the cause of the illusion. There are plenty of other 
illusions of the same type. You take up a small bottle 



ORIGIN OF SOME OF OUR EDUCATIONAL IDEALS 89 

of mercury and it will seem very heavy, much heavier 
than you expected from looking at the bottle. The 
sudden difference between what you expected and what 
you really get in the way of a sensation, increases very 
much the effect of the weight. "We say that the appar- 
ent weight has been increased by contrast. Now, in our 
experiment of the two bottles of the same weight but 
of different sizes, there is such a contrast. Bottles of 
different sizes are commonly different in weight. But 
if the expected difference in weight does not really ap- 
pear when we pick up the bottles, then we are led 
ihrough contrast to perceive just the opposite of what 
we expected. 

There is a not uncommon trick which is of the same 
type as this illusion of the bottles. Five or six of us 
stand around some person who lies on two chairs and at 
a given signal we each lift with one or two fingers of 
each hand, and the person seems to be very light. We 
do not pay attention to the fact that the weight is dis- 
tributed so as to be very little for each of the lifting 
fingers. We expect to lift 150 pounds, we actually lift 
about 15 pounds or less with each finger, and the re- 
sult is we do not notice the 15 pounds as being at all 
heavy. The contrast between 150 and 15 is great 
enough to account for the whole illusion. The holding 
of one's breath and the other mummeries that are 
generally added to the experiment, help to distract one 
still more from the 15 pounds that have to be lifted and 
so aid the illusion even further. 

Up to this time we have spoken of these illusions in 
the usual terms of impression and mental contrast, and 
I venture the guess that most of you have thought of 



90 GENETIC PSYCHOLOGY FOR TEACHERS 

mental contrast in this connection as a sort of conflict 
in the mind between what is expected and what really 
came in. That is, you have been satisfied to think 
of the whole matter as a mere com.parison of impres- 
sions. But there is a great deal of bodily activity in- 
volved in this illusion of which the explanation by mere 
impression does not take account. When you looked 
at the two bottles, or when you prepared to lift the 
person lying on the chair, the sight impressions that 
came in at your eyes were not the only facts which we 
need to consider. Your consciousness went beyond 
the impressions and interpreted them. The interpreta- 
tion involved as its most important factor in this case, 
a recognition of what you could do with the objects at 
which you were looking. What 3rou could do was 
added to the incoming sight impressions and your real 
idea of the objects before you was not merely " that 
thing," but it was rather " that thing which can be 
lifted with more or less effort." Even before you did 
any actual lifting your impression was joined to the pos- 
sibilities of expression. In some other cases, the ex- 
pression factor is more elaborate. For example, if one 
of the bottles is full of medicine and you look at it, you 
see not merely " that light-colored bottle which can be 
lifted," but you see " that light-colored bottle which is 
to be turned up and a part of its contents swallowed." 
In other words, there is no idea which is made up entirely 
of mere impression; there is always a factor of expres- 
sion. This factor of expression is so closely related to 
one's personal use of the object that we may say that the 
personal phase of all knowledge is the expressive phase. 
It is because there is something that I can do with ob- 



ORIGIN OF SOME OF OUR EDUCATIONAL IDEALS 91 

jects that these objects are of interest to me. Anything 
which I never can use, is of little importance to me, and 
I am sure to overlook it. What I can use, I look at 
sharply. I recognize, accordingly, when I look at such 
an object not merely its color or its form, but also its 
value to me. I add meaning to the impression in the 
manner described in our last chapter. And this fact of 
value or meaning is paralleled on the bodily side by an 
actual preparatory contraction of my muscles. If, as in 
the case of the bottles in our experiment, the object is 
small, the contraction of the muscles will be very slight, 
but it can nevertheless be demonstrated as present by 
means of appropriate recording apparatus. And what 
is of greatest importance to us here is that the in- 
tensity of muscular preparation for lifting agrees with 
our interpretation of the object as heavier or lighter. 
That is, in the case of the two bottles of different sizes 
and like weight, our muscular preparation is controlled 
by the different sizes, and we get ready in the case of 
the larger object to lift a heavier object. When now, we 
do the lifting, the larger object seems light because our 
actual muscular preparation was too great and the ob- 
ject was therefore very easily raised. The contrast, you 
see, is not a mere matter of comparing impressions in 
the mind, it is a question of the kind of interpretation 
which was added to the impression, and the interpreta- 
tion in this ease, as in every case, involves certain fac- 
tors of bodily action. Bodily action is present before 
the lifting really begins, and before we recognize that 
we are in action through any impressions of actual 
movement. Bodily action is the expressive side of the 
experience. We see accordingly that an incoming im- 



92 GENETIC PSYCHOLOGY FOR TEACHERS 

pression and the expressive interpretation, are mutually 
interdependent; that they supplement each other; and 
that together they constitute the total unitary ex- 
perience. 

The reason why we do not recognize in ordinary life 
the constant relation of bodily activities to impressions, 
is that we have a wrong notion of what goes to make up 
bodily activity. Most of us think of bodily activity as 
consisting in a movement of some of the external parts, 
such as the arm or face. We forget that there are cer- 
tain inner movements which are always changing with 
every incoming impression. Take, for example, the ac- 
tion of the heart. We all know that in extreme cases of 
strong or sudden impression, the heart beats violently, 
or seems suddenly to stop. We see the face grow red or 
white when the appropriate impression is received, even 
when there are no signs of external movement. What 
we see in extreme cases as noticeable changes in the 
action of the circulatory system, gives us a clue to the 
general fact which scientific investigation has fully 
established. This general fact is that every impression, 
be it ever so weak and insignificant, affects in its measure 
the distribution of the blood in the body. Put in other 
words, this means that one of the forms of bodily activ- 
ity which regularly accompanies impressions is the in- 
ternal change in the way in which the heart and the 
blood-vessels do their work. And this is a very large 
expressive factor; it is an important form of activity, 
even if it does not involve external muscles of the hand 
and face. 

One of the simplest ways of demonstrating the con- 
stancy and delicacy of these inner activities is that de- 



ORIGIN OP SOME OF OUR EDUCATIONAL IDEALS 93 

vised by Mosso, an Italian scientist. He balanced a 
man so carefully on a balance-board that the slightest 
increase in the amount of blood in the head would be 
indicated by a tipping of the board downward at the 
head end. Then he found that even if he let the man 
go to sleep, and thus made him less susceptible to im- 
pression than usual, the slightest noise would have as 
its immediate consequence an increase of the amount of 
blood in the head. Just as hard study or excitement 
results in a rush of large quantities of blood to the 
head, so a slight impression produces in its degree a 
slight increase in the amount of blood. The carefully 
constructed balance-board showed what the coarser ob- 
servation of ordinary life shows only in extreme cases. 

What is true of the activities of blood circulation 
is true also of activities of breathing and of digestion. 
One has felt himself stop breathing when listening in- 
tently to some piece of music or to some patriotic orator. 
One has seen a whole company draw a long breath of re- 
lief after an exciting scene on the stage. The holding 
of the breath and the long after-breath show how very 
strongly our activity of breathing is affected by the im- 
pressions that come in at ears and eyes. 

As for digestion, we all know that excitement is very 
far from conducive to the enjoyment of healthy life; 
and recent researches carried out with the aid of the 
Rontgen rays on the movements of the stomach of a 
cat during digestion showed that these movements 
stopped with surprising promptness and invariability 
whenever the animal was disturbed by any external im- 
pression. 

All of these facts serve to call attention to activities 



94 GENETIC PSYCHOLOGY FOR TEACHERS 

accompanying impressions, and they ought to enlarge 
our common view of what activity means. When one 
sits still and listens, he may be very active in some one 
of these internal systems, even though he presents to 
himself and to the world at large a placid and unruffled 
exterior. 

It remains to mention another group of activities 
which are not internal, but commonly escape attention 
because they are so constant. Did you ever stop to con- 
sider that each one of us is constantly active so long as 
he sits up and holds up his head? One has only to 
watch a nodding, drowsy man to realize how much 
muscular energy is involved in our ordinary sitting up. 
The muscles of the neck are always in a state of tension 
during waking hours, and their activity must not be 
omitted when we are making up a list of our ordinary 
bodily responses to impressions. For is not hanging the 
head a proverbial expression for shame? Do we not 
recognize the man of buoyant sjjirit by the proud 
carriage and the head thrown back? Do we not notice 
the straighter walk of the soldier when the thrilling 
martial music is ringing in his ears? Indeed, one can 
notice on every hand the close relation between the 
way one carries himself and the way one looks at the 
world about him and sees in its impressions hope and 
promise or envy and enmity. One's bodily activity can 
not be described without full recognition of these forms 
of muscular activity which appear in our attitudes. 
They are not forms of rapid movement, and that is why 
they do not impress us very strikingly. They show all 
the better the fundamental distinction between the 
activity and what we ordinarily mean when we use the 



ORIGIN OF SOME OF OUR EDUCATIONAL IDEALS 95 

term movement. The body is always active, internally 
and externally, whether its parts are noticeably moving 
or not. 

This distinction between activity and movement is 
significant for the teacher. Do you think that the boy 
who sits still in his seat at school is not active just 
because he is not moving? Watch him a little more 
closely and you will see that the true description of 
what he is doing involves a good deal of attention to 
forms of activity that are no less real because they are 
not forms of external movement. That boy would, if 
he did the natural thing, get up out of his seat and 
come up to you, as, indeed, he often starts to do when 
he forgets. He would naturally start and go to his 
neighbor who has something interesting under his desk, 
if it were not for the law of the school. He would jump 
up and look out of the window at the slightest provoca- 
tion. The reason why he does not do this is that a 
kindly Providence has furnished him with two sets of 
muscles, one which would fain do the forbidden thing, 
and the other set to hold back these unruly members. 
And when the boy wants to look out of the window, 
but seeing the threatening look of the teacher, holds 
himself in the seat, he sits still by sheer force of 
muscular activity. His warring activities are not as 
obvious to the eye as they would be if he started up and 
then sat down again in a hurry, but he is in reality 
getting up and sitting down at the same instant, so that 
what may look to the superficial observer like sitting 
still is in reality doing much hard work. 

You have felt like sneezing or coughing, have you 
not, when you were obliged to go through the ex- 



9G GENETIC PSYCHOLOGY FOR TEACHERS 

cruciating experience of keeping still ? You have had a 
tickling sensation on the end of your nose at a time 
when you did not dare, out of respect to your social 
environment, move your hand up to that irritating 
organ? How did you manage in these cases to sit still? 
Was it not through an effort, and was that effort any 
the less real because it did not involve actual move- 
ment? Such an experience ought to help you to under- 
stand why it is that a boy has such difficulty in keeping 
still; for the sights and sounds out of doors which stir 
our torpid grown-up blood all too little, are to him the 
most attractive objects in the universe, and the thought 
of running about the room is as irresistible to him as is 
the most inviting allurement to our adult ambitions. 

But we must draw this discussion to a close with- 
out entering into any of the applications of this principle 
that mental activity is always paralleled by bodily activ- 
ity. It is to be hoped, however, that the impression 
begins to grow in your minds that we are very active 
beings, and that our usual prejudice against activity 
in the school is not altogether justified. The activities 
which we are exhibiting in larger measure than we 
usually realize, are of great importance to the teacher 
in his study of himself and in his study of his pupil. 
The traditional notion that the school is a place in 
which impressions are merely to be poured into the 
mind has had its day. We are beginning to enter upon 
a new era with new educational ideals, and it will be well 
for us to get out our old ideals about the nature of 
mental life and give them a thorough renovating. The 
fact is that most of our notions about bodily activity are 
due to the fact that we have overlooked the inner activ- 



ORIGIN OF SOME OF OUR EDUCATIONAL IDEALS 97 

ities, and that we have overlooked those constant ex- 
ternal activities which do not result in actual and 
obvious movements. But these large groups of unno- 
ticed activities are very closely related to our impres- 
sions. A given impression results in its own appropriate 
activity, and that activity is just as much a part of the 
bodily condition of the experience and of its interpreta- 
tion as is the process in the eye or ear which we call a 
sensory excitation. 

We shall take up next some discussion of the gen- 
eral principles upon which we are reconstructing our 
educational ideals. The work of this chapter has been 
largely negative. We have attempted to call atten- 
tion to the fact that the teacher's professional ideals 
frequently rise and get themselves established on 
wholly inadequate grounds. The teacher then forgets 
where the ideal really came from, and holds to the un- 
justified ideal with all the greater tenacity because its 
grounds are lost from view. What we need in our 
study as teachers, is to become conscious of our ideals, 
to think of their grounds, and to recast many a false 
belief in view of fuller and better knowledge. 



CHAPTEE IV 

THE NEW IDEALS OF DEVELOPMENT 

The last chapter closed rather abruptly with a nega- 
tive conclusion. In that discussion we were showing 
how unfounded is our ordinary notion that mental 
life can be understood without attention to accom- 
panying bodily activities. There was a very large 
positive principle involved in that conclusion, the 
principle that every mental state has its parallel bodily 
expression, but we did not there attempt to work out 
that positive principle with all its pedagogical corol- 
laries. 

The negative conclusions of our earlier discussions 
were, however, merely preparatory to the positive, con- 
structive treatment of educational ideals. Certainly 
there could be no justification for mere negations 
in a series of discussions of this sort. Indeed, there 
is no justification for mere negation in the thought 
of any teacher. We should never stop working 
on our ideals until we have something positive. See to 
it that you never cultivate that chronic state of doubt 
which makes it impossible for you to believe in the 
validity of any ideal. You will never have peace of mind 
in your teaching, you will never overcome the fretful 
wear and tear of seeking after petty devices, until you 
98 



THE NEW IDEALS OP DEVELOPMENT 99 

have found out some broad positive principles wliicli 
can be relied upon to guide your work. 

Fortunately there are many positive ideals and 
positive principles with which to replace old and worn- 
out prejudices. These newer ideals are being offered 
to the teachers on many sides. Sometimes the new 
principle is only half formulated. Sometimes the en- 
thusiastic advocate is disposed to overemphasize the 
value of this or that new educational doctrine. In- 
deed, there is much sinning by way of omission and 
commission; but through all the error and the mis- 
guided enthusiasm, one can see the outlines of a few 
of the great fundamental principles which promise to 
furnish our educational practise with a firmer and 
broader basis than has ever been known before. 

One of these general principles is the principle of 
expression, with the negative side of which we closed our 
last chapter. No one has given this principle a clearer 
statement than has Professor James in that admirable 
book of his, Talks to Teachers. He defines educa- 
tion ^ as " The organization of acquired habits of con- 
duct and tendencies to behavior." Such a definition 
throws the whole weight of attention in teaching, not 
on the impression which is given to the child, but on 
the expression which is to result from the impression. 
In the chapter following the one from which we just 
quoted. Professor James confirms the position taken 
in his definition of education with these strong words : ^ 
" An impression which simply flows in at the pupil's 
eyes or ears, and in no way modifies his active life, is an 

1 Page 29. 2 Pages 33, 34 

L.ofC. 



100 GENETIC PSYCHOLOGY FOR TEACHERS 

impression gone to waste .... It leaves no fruits be- 
hind it in the way of capacity acquired. . . . Its motor 
consequences are what clinch it. Some effect due to it 
in the way of an activity must return to the mind in 
the form of the sensation of having acted, and connect 
itself with the impression. The most durable im- 
pressions are those on account of which we speak or 
act, or else are inwardly convulsed." Such an ideal 
as this which Professor James gives us is certain- 
ly full of positive suggestions for the class-room 
teacher. 

One might seek out other examples of strong posi- 
tive contributions to educational thought, but we shall 
not content ourselves with a mere review of these prin- 
ciples as they are given to us by our leading thinkers. 
AYe are fortunate in being able to seek the same source 
of inspiration which these great leaders have sought, for 
the whole thought of our times, not only in education, 
but in every sphere of natural science and sociology and 
psychology, is dominated and controlled by the one 
great principle, the principle of development. 

Within the last half century we have seen this idea 
of development rise and spread over every domain of 
human thought. The geologist seeks to know the de- 
velopment of our planet. The astronomer inquires 
boldly into the secrets of the great cosmic development 
that brought forth our sun and our sister worlds. On 
the other hand, delving down into the infinitely small, 
the biologist seeks to know the development of the 
minutest living cell. Even the student of human life 
in any and all of its phases, has adopted the same point 
of view, and whether he be historian, or economist, or 



THE NEW IDEALS OF DEVELOPMENT 101 

psychologist, liis chief problem is to trace the course of 
human development. 

I need not tell you that in the educational world this 
same idea of development is everywhere being recog- 
nized. The development of the child, the development 
of our school organization, the development of the cur- 
riculum — all these are common subjects of investiga- 
tion. Has not our own subject up to this time been 
the subject of the development of the teacher's ideals? 
And so we are introducing no strange question when we 
ask what is this general idea of development. What 
is its value to the teacher, and hoA? can we get some help 
from it in our school work? If it is true that Pro- 
fessor James in his Talks to Teachers is only work- 
ing out this idea; if it is true that Professor Dewey is 
seeking to realize the same ideal in his experiments; 
if it is true that President Hall has to thank his grasp 
of the same idea for what of value there is in his wri- 
tings — if all these men come back to the one broad idea 
of development as their starting-point, then, certainly, 
it is time that the individual teacher should turn with all 
despatch to a study of this fundamental idea. 

True, this is no easy task which I have proposed to 
you, for all the recent writings in the sciences and in 
education have been trying to work out the details 
of this idea. The stol-y is told of Huxley, the Eng- 
lish scientist, that on one occasion a narrow-minded 
opponent wrote, demanding that Huxley send him a 
brief summary of all the arguments for evolution, in 
order that this same opponent might refute them. 
Huxley replied, advising his correspondent to take a 
complete course in the science of comparative anatomy, 



102 GENETIC PSYCHOLOGY FOR TEACHERS 

in which science Huxley assured him he would find 
many of the reasons in favor of evolution. And^ per- 
haps, some captious critic will be disposed to set aside 
our suggestion that the individual teacher acquaint 
himself or herself with the meaning of this fundamental 
idea of development on the ground that such an ac- 
quaintance would involve a study of all recent science. 
But I think we can meet our critic by admitting frankly 
the truth which there is in his remark. Certainly the 
individual teacher can not read all the modern litera- 
ture on development. On the other hand, no teacher 
should fail to read some of this literature, enough at 
least to grasp the meaning of the idea. If each teacher 
will get the broad outlines of the idea, he or she may 
leave it to the specialists to work out the details in this 
direction and in that, devoting himself or herself to the 
narrow and yet thoroughly productive task of working 
out the details of the idea in the class-room. 

The educational world has need of a vast army of 
investigators to settle some of the unsettled questions 
about mental development. The various forms of de- 
velopment of the mind in the course of its learning to 
read, or write, or count, are phases of development with 
which no one is fully acquainted. These are phases of 
development that no one has any better opportunity to 
investigate than the individual teacher. Let us not 
give up this task because we can not solve it before we 
begin our work. Let us, rather, boldly enter into the in- 
vestigation, first getting something of the inspiration 
and guidance that is to be derived from a survey of the 
general principle of development as it has been formu- 
lated by the leaders in science up to this time. 



THE NEW IDEALS OF DEVELOPMENT 103 

The idea of development was first worked out in the 
science of biology. Tlie other sciences, such as soci- 
ology and psychology, have borrowed a great deal from 
the earlier studies of biology. Perhaps we shall do 
well to go back to the biological formulation of the 
principle of development as the basis for our present 
discussion. 

The biological notion of development may be de- 
fined by the use of three phrases. The first of these is 
the phrase, individual variation, the second is selection, 
and the third is hereditary transmission. The best way 
in which to get at the meaning of these three phrases 
will be to take a concrete illustration. 

There is a little mouse-like animal which lives in our 
fields and burrows under the sod for earthworms. It is 
called a ground mole, and has broad shovel-shaped fore- 
feet by means of which it does its digging. This same 
little animal has very small, weak eyes. Indeed, at 
times the eyes are not only much reduced in size, but 
are covered with a layer of skin so that they are use- 
less for vision. The mole spends most of its time 
underground, and digs out intricate passages for itself 
in its search for food. 

We know something of the history of the mole 
species through our study of embryology, for the 
embryo repeats in a large measure the typical stages of 
the development of the species. Our knowledge of the 
history of the mole species teaches us that generations 
and generations ago, the ancestors of the present moles 
were of a different type. They were small, mouse-like 
creatures which devoured insects and worms, but lived 
above the ground and had strong eyes and no broad 



104 GENETIC PSYCHOLOGY FOR TEACHERS 

digging forefeet. In other words, the first moles were 
not like the present moles either in habits or in struc- 
ture. 

Let us carry ourselves back in imagination to the 
early moles that lived above ground and had strong 
eyes and slender toes. We know what happened with 
a good deal of detail, for the biologist has seen similar 
facts over and over again in our modern world. There 
was a day on which some mole in foraging for food got 
hold of an earthworm. It turned out to be good food, 
and the fortunate mole began to look for more. Finally, 
it found that it could get earthworms best by doing a 
little digging. A good many animals have learned to 
dig to some extent; think of the fowls. But this dig- 
ging meant a great change in the mole. It began to be 
interested in a wholly new kind of life. The earth- 
worms had never been the prey of animals of this kind 
before, and they were very plenty. The whole mole 
family began to dig for worms. 

By and by there was born in the family a little mole 
which had broader forefeet than moles had been used to 
having. Whether this was due to the fact that the 
parents of Broadfoot had been getting stronger and 
broader feet by digging, or whether it was a mere acci- 
dent, is hard to decide. The fact is that the little 
mole arrived with a broader foot. This individual 
variation, as the biologists call it, this deviation from 
the usual structure of the family, gave Broadfoot a great 
advantage. He could dig faster and could get more 
worms with his improved shovel than could any of his 
family. He even grew bold and went clear under the 
ground, and in that way he escaped the enemies he 



THE NEW IDEALS OF DEVELOPMENT 105 

would have met above ground, and had an ea.sier time 
under ground where there was less competition. The 
experiment which nature had tried of giving one little 
mole broad feet was a great success. The advantages 
which Broadfoot enjoyed made him live longer, and he 
had a larger family and supported them better, so that 
ultimately broad feet came to be the most common 
form among moles, and the moles with slender feet had 
a harder and harder time, and ultimately died out. This 
preservation of the stronger type and decline of the 
weaker type is what the biologist calls natural selection. 
Natural selection is no premeditated choice on any one's 
part ; it is, to use another current phrase, merely the sur- 
vival of the fittest. And the fittest who survive, trans- 
mit their strong characteristics to their young through 
hereditary transmission. Some of the young in any 
family get more and some get less of the desirable char- 
acteristics. Thus, we have a new series of individual 
variations and a new series of selections of the fittest, 
and a new series of transmissions. 

The broad feet of the mole have thus, through long 
generations, been gradually improved until they have 
reached their present form. In the meantime let us not 
forget to include the eyes in our study of development. 
The first moles probably had a good deal of incon- 
venience under the ground with sand which kept getting 
into their eyes. By variation the eyes of some moles 
turned out to be very small and weak — all the better 
for the underground burrowing. In fact this seeming- 
weakness was a positive advantage. What a fortunate 
mole among moles must have been the one born with 
a layer of skin completely covering the eyes ! 



106 GENETIC PSYCHOLOGY FOR TEACHERS 

Development is thus a progressive fitting of a species 
more and more fully to its environment. Whatever is 
desirable in the structure of any member of the species 
is fostered and improved. Whatever is undesirable is 
cut off. But desirable and undesirable in this case are 
relative terms. Desirable means helpful in the given 
environment. Thus we should speak of characteristics 
as being, not absolutely good or absolutely bad, but as 
suited or unsuited to the environment. 

The principle of adaptation was forcefully stated by 
Professor Minot in his address as president of the 
American Association for the Advancement of Science. 
His statement was as follows: "Vital functions have a 
purpose. The purpose is always the maintenance of 
the individual or of the race in its environment. 
The entire evolution of plants and animals is 
essentially the evolution of the means of adjustment 
of the organism to external conditions." And after 
making this general statement. Professor Minot applies 
the principle to human progress, so that there may be 
no doubt as to the man's share in this progressive 
adaptation to environment. He says: " In practical life 
it is convenient to distinguish the works of nature from 
the works of man, the ' natural ' from the ' artificial.' 
The biologist, on the contrary, must never allow himself 
to forget that man is a part of nature, and that all his 
works are natural works. This is especially important 
for the present discussion, for otherwise we are likely 
to forget also that man is as completely subject to the 
necessity of adjustment to external reality as any other 
organism. From the biological standpoint all the work 
of agriculture, of manufactures, of commerce and of 



THE NEW IDEALS OF DEVELOPMENT 107 

government is a part of the work of consciousness to 
secure the needed adjustments." ^ 

It should be noticed in this connection that develop- 
ment for adaptation may reach a stage of relative com- 
pletion. That is, progress in adaptation may go so far 
that an animal is sufficiently well adapted to the par- 
ticular environment in which he lives, and then change 
either stops entirely or goes forward only very slowly. 
Thus, the forefeet of the ground mole represent what 
is, in all probabilities a completed adaptation. If the 
forefeet should by variation appear in any given mole 
wider than the average, this would be no advantage, 
for an increase above the average width of the digging 
foot would require an increase in muscular strength in 
order to manipulate the wider foot. And this increase 
in strength would require in turn a larger body, and a 
larger body would mean that the mole would have to 
make a larger passage through the ground. These 
larger passages would require more digging than the 
smaller mole has to do with the average forefoot, and 
this requirement of more digging would neutralize the 
advantage of the broader forefoot. There is thus a 
certain equilibrium where the animal is better off than 
it would be through further increase in the size of its 
organs. Many animals which have been long in a given 
environment have reached such a state of relatively 
complete adaptation. 

We turn now from the kind of development which 
we have been discussing, the structural development, as 
we may call it, to consider another phase of develop- 

1 Science, July 4, 1902, pp. 9, 10. 



108 GENETIC PSYCHOLOGY FOR TEACHERS 

ment. There is a social development as well as a 
structural development. Every species of animals de- 
velops certain common habits of life, and these are 
transmitted to the young of the species through the ex- 
ample set by the older members. The social tradition 
is very strong in certain species. Think, for example, 
of a little ant or a little bee coming into their re- 
spective communities. The military order and division 
of labor in an ant-hill or in a bee-hive, are matters that 
could not be transmitted to the young of the species in 
the form of bodily structures, but they are a part of 
the lesson of living which the species has learned in its 
long struggle for existence. The young addition to 
the community must learn to fit into the cooperative life 
of the community. This process of learning what are 
the rules of community life, will be a great benefit to the 
individual, and he will gain from it lessons which he 
never could have worked out for himself if he had not 
seen the whole community in action. The individual, 
therefore, gets, through imitation, a kind of social in- 
heritance which is different from the structural inherit- 
ance with which we are well acquainted. Imitation has 
accordingly been called the means of social heredity. 

Social heredity is one of the most important phases 
of human development. To be sure, we are in very 
large measure what we are as individuals because of a 
long process of structural development in our race. 
Think of our hands and feet, for example, as illustra- 
tions of structural adaptation. In the other higher 
animals the fore extremities and hind extremities are 
much alike, but with us the legs are long, strong, sup- 
porting organs, ending in feet which are very advan- 



THE NEW IDEALS OF DEVELOPMENT 109 

tageously supplied with broad flat walking surfaces and 
with short and little developed digits. The arms are 
light and muscular, with free joints, and they carry 
hands which have long flexible digits adapted to the 
most delicate kinds of manipulation. Surely this dif- 
ferentiation in the structure of our hands and feet 
shows a very high degree of adaptation of the purely 
physical or structural type. But think of the im- 
mensely higher form of development which comes in the 
life of every one through social heredity. Think, for 
example, of the student of art, supplied with hands 
through physical development, but learning the use of 
those hands only through the careful training of some 
master. This master's training is a part of the student's 
social inheritance. Or think of the athlete supplied 
with legs and feet through structural inheritance, but 
learning the use of these organs under the social 
stimulus of competitive races. Our social training is, 
after all, our highest inheritance. 

Before we turn to the direct application of all these 
general terms which we have been defining, to our own 
special problem of school training, it will be well for us 
to recognize the fact that variation, and selection, and 
adaptation have a narrower meaning and may be applied 
to strictly individual life. Not only does the individual 
as a member of a species profit by advantageous varia- 
tions, but the individual develops in the course of his 
own life through a similar series of discoveries of new 
adjustments. Thus, take the case of a man who has 
always done some act in a given way, until suddenly he 
finds by a chance variation or by a carefully premedi- 
tated variation in his mode of action, that some other 



110 GENETIC PSYCHOLOGY FOR TEACHERS 

way is better. This is a personal variation. The sav- 
age who first discovered that arrows would fly straighter 
if feathers were added to the bare shaft, contributed an 
important fact to general knowledge through individual 
variation. 

The period in life when variations are the pre- 
dominating facts is the period of childhood. Did you 
ever notice that children learn to ride a bicycle sooner 
than old people, and are very much freer in their actions 
after they have learned? Their greater facility in 
learning is due to the fact that they begin to learn at 
a period when all tlieir movements are much more vari- 
able than they will be in later life. Consequently, chil- 
dren discover the right movement to make in balancing 
themselves on a bicycle sooner than adults, because 
they naturally make more different kinds of movements. 
They have, to use the technical terms, a greater series of 
variations in action from which the best and most 
adaptive movement may be selected. 

After this general discussion of the nature of de- 
velopment, let us turn to a consideration of some of the 
modifications which the acceptance of this general idea 
has wrought in our pedagogical ideals. Take first of 
all the question which Franke discussed so seriously, 
the question of whether the child is by nature good or 
bad. You remember Franke's answer. He said the 
child is low and earthy in his nature. His play is an 
exhibition of the evil in him, and so on through the 
whole list of childish characteristics. This view was 
perhaps more than usually emphasized by Franke and 
his followers, but it represents fairly well the generally 
accepted notion about the child even less than two 



THE NEW IDEALS OP DEVELOPMENT 111 

centuries ago. Eigor and constant suppression of the 
childish nature were the accepted practises of the school, 
so long as this view prevailed. 

Suddenly, in the midst of all this rigor of practise 
and strenuousness of ideal, there came the teacher of a 
new educational gospel. That new gospel was given to 
the world by Eousseau in his book on the education of 
Emile. If Franke and others had thought the child's 
nature evil, hear the opening sentence of Rousseau's 
book : " Everything is good as it comes from the hands 
of the Author of ISTature, but everything degenerates in 
the hands of man." ^ And then if you will follow the 
later argument of the book, you will find Rousseau carry- 
ing out the idea that the child is good and needs only to 
be allowed to grow up in a perfectly natural way. We 
are warned against the harmful influences of social life, 
against the artificial practises of the schools. Back to 
nature! Back to the primitive forms of life! These 
were the doctrines of Rousseau and his school. 

With this fundamental disagreement between those 
who believe the child to be good, and those who believe 
the child to be bad by nature, what is the individual 
teacher to accept as the true ideal? I confess I do not 
wonder that teachers feel confused. Take, for example, 
the modern form of this same dispute about the good- 
ness or badness of the child's nature. It centers around 
that word of which we hear so much from the Herbarti- 
ans, the word interest. There are those who tell us 
that the child's native interests are the safest guides to 
lead us in the tasks of selecting and arranging educa- 

^ Payne's translation, p. 1, 



112 GENETIC PSYCHOLOGY FOR TEACHERS 

tional materials. We have heard educational writers 
and speakers enforce this argument in favor of natural 
tastes and interests by such statements as this: 
" Physicians are coming to agree that in cases of con- 
valescence from disease, when there are no known rules 
to guide the patient's diet, it is safe and expedient to 
follow the patient's own wishes." " Hence," runs the 
argument, " when we do not know what is the best 
course to pursue in directing the development of the 
child, it is safe to follow the child's own interests." 

Opposed to all this unqualified acceptance of the 
child's interests, as guides of our educational practise, 
stands our knowledge that children's interests are very 
transient and often very trivial. Some would say that 
it is obviously best at times to make the children do 
tlie hard and uninteresting things. I am not sure that 
the highest wisdom does not favor that strenuous form 
of training which one of our Chicago educators is said 
to have adopted. He is so opposed to the doctrine of 
natural interests that he gives his children each day, at 
a certain hour by the clock, a short course in bodily 
chastisement as a supposedly helpful, though probably 
uninteresting, preparation for the hard, uncompromis- 
ing duties of life. 

So the dispute goes on, and there seems to be little 
light on the difficult question of whether the child is 
good or bad. As for most of us, we work out a sort 
of average between the two extreme views. We ap- 
plaud the eulogizing of the child nature in public, and 
we reserve the right to think a great deal in private 
about the child's innate wickedness. We urge leniency 
on our fellow teachers in view of our confidence that the 



THE NEW IDEALS OF DEVELOPMENT 113 

cliild is by nature tending toward better things; and 
yet for ourselves we sometimes mourn that the day of 
the rod as the symbol of pedagogical authority is 
rapidly passing. In short, we have most of us patched 
up a compromise between Franke and Eousseau, and 
believe in both. The child is bad, yes, that is too true ! 
The child is good by nature, yes, that is the saving 
clause in our creed! 

The gratifying fact about the doctrine of develop- 
ment is that it makes it possible to continue in our 
average belief that the child is neither wholly good nor 
wholly bad, and at the same time it places this average 
belief of ours on a firm rational foundation and explains 
it and illuminates it in the most complete fashion. 

The doctrine of development says of the child, here 
is an immature being. He is not adapted to the en- 
vironment in which he has to live. He does all sorts 
of things that would injure him, and fails to do a 
great many things that are quite essential to a happy 
and successful life in this environment. In short, con- 
sidered with reference to the immediate present, this 
child is about as poorly adapted to life as any one easily 
could be. But, continues the doctrine of development, 
this is, after all, not so bad as it might be, for the child 
has certain redeeming characteristics. He has the pos- 
sibilities of variations and adjustments in a much higher 
degree than we older people have. Where we fail to 
fit our environments, we are generally so fixed in our 
habits that we can not easily change. If we are un- 
adapted now, we continue unadapted to the end. The 
child, on the other hand, has the largest possibilities of 
fitting himself to his environment. In this he is much 



114 GENETIC PSYCHOLOGY FOR TEACHERS 

better off than any mature person in the world. If the 
child's lack of adaptation is a bad characteristic, then 
certainly this adaptability is one of his most hopeful 
characteristics, and quite compensates for his lack of 
present adaptation. 

Do you not see where the fault has been in earlier 
discussions of this subject? Teachers have applied 
adult standards to the child's life. According to adult 
standards, lack of adaptation is an evil. We must come 
to recognize the fact that in judging the child's nature 
no such standard will apply. 

See how this new view of the child as a developing 
individual is modifying our notion of punishment. We 
do not punish a child now because we wish to meet out 
to him vengeance for his infraction of law. We punish 
a child these days only when we deem pain helpful to 
him as an aid toward his more complete adaptation. 
The law of the school has a deeper meaning to us. It 
is a rule which if obeyed will help the child to pass from 
an unadapted state to one of adaptation. If the rule is 
not strong enough to lead the child pleasantly and 
without compulsion in the right direction, stronger 
measures must be adopted. Teachers of to-day who 
understand the real meaning of punishment do not get 
angry at children. I think the greatest advance in 
school discipline that we have to record in recent 
generations is the advance which has been made in the 
teacher's attitude toward the child. To-day we look 
upon the child's mistakes and failures as phases of the 
process of development. We correct these shortcom- 
ings as a part of our general duty of supervising develop- 
ment. 



THE NEW IDEALS OP DEVELOPMENT 115 

While we are on this subject of punishment as one 
phase of the process of education, it is interesting to 
note that we who teach in the schools are not the 
only ones who have come to take a broader view of the 
meaning of the terms good and bad, because of this in- 
creased insight into the nature of human development. 
Go to any one of the well-conducted penitentiaries of 
the land and you will see that there too, men are treated, 
not as if confinement were society's revenge, but as if 
confinement were society's means of education. There 
are a great many men to-day who are studying the 
criminal, and they are very generally of the opinion that 
the typical criminal is a man whose development has 
been arrested in some way or other. Give this undevel- 
oped man an opportunity to get some further training 
and see if we can not in that way adapt him to life in 
the community. That is the way in which those who 
study the criminal are arguing, and their principle is 
exactly the same, if you will only recognize it, as that 
which we are adopting under very much happier condi- 
tions in our schools. 

You can see, I think, that the far-sighted applica- 
tion of this principle of punishment as a means to edu- 
cation does not forbid the use of pain. We are not to 
make the developing process at all stages one of easy 
concession to individual preferences. The fact is that 
every now and then the individual needs a sharp turn 
in development. Even nature, to which appeal is so 
often made by those who would have the child's life one 
unbroken day of sunshine — even nature uses pain as a 
means of development. The unpleasant consequences 
from any form of overindulgence are nature's punish- 



116 GENETIC PSYCHOLOGY FOR TEACHERS 

ments. They are not nature's revenges, but rather her 
lessons to guide us in the future. 

Another change in our educational views which has 
resulted from our new insight into the nature of de- 
velopment is that we do not regard the child's early un- 
successful efforts in any line of thought or action as 
culpable mistakes. When our fathers and mothers 
went to school, the teacher used to blame the boys and 
girls for not being able to write well or pronounce well, 
or for not being a'bie to do this or the other thing cor- 
rectly. The teacher merely heard lessons; sat as a sort 
of judge of the perfection of the child's adaptation, and 
measured out reward or punishment according as the 
child was successful or unsuccessful. To-day we think 
of the child's errors, not as culpable offenses, but as in- 
dications of a need of fuller development. We do not 
demand of the immature child that he shall fulfil the 
same requirements as those which we impose on adults. 
In short, we consider perfection to be a relative term, 
to be applied Avith a clear recognition of the stage of 
individual development. 

The adoption of different standards of judgment for 
different levels of development is a phase of our ap- 
plication of the new ideals of development to which we 
have already made frequent references in earlier chap- 
ters. We pointed out, you will recall, in our first dis- 
cussion of visual perception, that the same image falling 
on two different eyes will be differently interpreted. 
These different interpretations, even when they are 
what we call illusions, are not to be classified as right 
and wrong, but rather as more or less fully developed. 
And so through our whole discussion of the teacher's 



THE NEW IDEALS OF DEVELOPMENT 117 

life, we have been seeing again and again the same 
general principle illustrated, the principle that differ- 
ent stages of mental life are different in character and 
require different standards of judgment. 

This difference between different levels of develop- 
ment is sometimes overlooked because we see the same 
person j)assing through the different stages of progress. 
We see the same boy, for example, taking work in arith- 
metic and then in algebra, and we somehow think of 
the boy as just getting more and more mathematics. In 
other words, we overlook the fact that the general word 
mathematics covers a number of different modes of 
thought, and that the word boy covers a great many 
different levels of development. Sometimes we have a 
striking illustration which calls our attention em- 
phatically to the fact that the boy studying arithmetic 
is quite a different grade of boy from the same boy 
•when he has, later in life, grasped the mode of thought 
appropriate to algebra. 

Let me give you an illustration which brings out the 
difference between the arithmetical stage of develop- 
ment and the algebraical stage. Some years ago some 
students of education and of mental life discovered in 
a country district in Indiana one of those interesting 
characters known as a mathematical prodigy. This boy 
could add great columns of figures with astounding 
rapidity. He had a multiplication table that ran up to 
150. He knew all the short methods of calculation 
given in the books on rapid methods, and he had in- 
vented other rapid methods unknown to the makers of 
books. In short, he. had more arithmetic in his head 
and at his ready disposal than any of the skilful 



118 GENETIC PSYCHOLOGY FOR TEACHERS 

mathematicians in the land. They took this boy from 
his home to the State University and tried to train him 
so that he might find a higher use for his mathematical 
bent. But just at this point they discovered the fact 
in which we are now interested. They found that this 
boy had so much arithmetic that he could not, or would 
not, learn any algebra. In other words, he had de- 
veloped all of his powers in one way, and that, too, at a 
relatively low level, and now the next step upward was 
impossible to him. Algebra was not according to his 
mode of thought. 

Nothing could show more clearly than this example 
of the arithmetical prodigy the fact that modes of 
thought at one level of development are not the same 
as modes of thought at higher levels. The most 
obvious warning which comes from the case cited in our 
illustration is the warning not to let children stay too 
long at one level of development. But deejDer than this 
warning, the student can see in the example a most 
admirable illustration of the broad princij)le that differ- 
ent stages of mental development are essentially differ- 
ent, and require different standards of judgment. 

AVhat is perhaps the clearest recognition of this 
principle, appears in the recent scientific studies of the 
mental lives of animals. Animals have often been 
credited with marvelous mental powers. "Wlio has not 
heard that crows and cats can coimt? Who does not 
wonder at the geometrical knowledge of the bee which 
builds its cell in the perfect hexagonal form, and so on 
through the whole list of animal achievements? And 
now we are coming to recognize more and more clearly 
that in none of these performances of the animals is 



THE NEW IDEALS OP DEVELOPMENT 119 

there any justification for assuming the existence of 
marvelous mental powers. 

The crow sees five men go into a hut and four come 
out, and he does not allow himself to fall into the trap 
and come into dangerous proximity to the one remain- 
ing man. But that does not show that the crow counted 
the men who went in and the men who came out. It 
might show ability to count if mental life were all at one 
level, and that the level of mature counting conscious- 
ness at which we live. But even you and I have 
methods of dealing with number relations without 
resorting to our usual method, which is the highly 
developed method of counting. Did you never go to 
the store and make a number of purchases and then 
start home with a haunting feeling that you have left 
something unpurchased? You did not count, that is 
obvious, for if you had, you would have been sure 
whether you had left something undone or not. Can 
you explain that feeling? Certainly the feeling is not 
the result of counting. 

Or take an illustration from some of the experi- 
ments which the psychologists try in their laboratories. 
Sit down at your table and with a pencil make a series 
of taps. Do not count, but just make a short series of 
about eight to twelve taps. Now pause for a moment, 
and make another series of exactly the same length. 
You can do it with a certainty which will surprise you 
if you have never tried it before, and all this without 
counting. 

The fact is, we have in mature mental life a good 
many different ways of dealing with number relations 
— some higher and some lower. The highest way of 



120 GENETIC PSYCnOLOGY FOR TEACHERS 

dealing with these relations is that of counting; one 
of the lower ways is that which we have just described 
of grouping objects without counting. The crow prob- 
ably does not count, he recognizes groups. 

Or take other relations than the number relation. 
Take some of the animal instincts that make animals 
appear to have such great foresight. Take the persist- 
ent and highly commendable devotion of the setting 
hen to her eggs. We shall be deceived if we attribute 
all this to any clear-headed maternal foresight or pro- 
phetic imagination. Her action is rather, as Professor 
James says, to be attributed merely to a blind feeling 
uppermost in her consciousness that those eggs are the 
never-too-much-to-be-sat -upon things. 

Or another illustration given us by the naturalist 
Wallace, may be used to illustrate how animals come 
to deal easily with distances and with falling bodies. 
Their knowledge of these subjects is not of the high 
type of the scientist who lays his yard-stick upon the 
distances and times the falling body with his delicate 
chronometer. When you hear this illustration repeated 
you should think of that blind form of feeling for dis- 
tance which the ball-player has when he pitches a 
curved ball or bats at one. You should think of the 
way in which a billiard-player knows his angles of re- 
bound without the higher abstract forms of measure- 
ment. The illustration, which I wish to borrow from 
Wallace, is a description of the skill in flight exhibited 
by certain sea-gulls in the Southern seas. Far from 
land, and quite unable to light in order to devour the 
fish which are their prey, these gulls develop the ability 
to feed in mid-air. After catching a fish, one of these 



THE NEW IDEALS OP DEVELOPMENT 121 

birds soars far above tlie surface of tbe water and there 
it cuts the body of its prey in two with its sharp beak, 
and lets one part fall while it swallows the other part. 
Then, with incredible rapidity, the bird swoops down- 
ward^ overtaking the falling part before it reaches the 
water, and, recapturing it, rises again and repeats the 
process until finally it has devoured all of the fish. 
Such activities as these are more accurately adjusted to 
the relations of space and gravity than any of which 
the child or even the most highly trained adult is 
capable. And yet Ave do not think of the bird as higher 
in its intelligence than man. The fact is, we recognize 
the general principle that the level of mental develop- 
ment attained by the bird, and hence its whole mode of 
mental action, is different from that exhibited in the 
highest processes of adult life. 

This principle of mental development is coming to 
be very fully accepted among scientific students of ani- 
mal life. It is also coming to be recognized more and 
more by teachers as they study the levels of mental devel- 
opment at which they find children. Children, too, have 
a certain recognition of number. Is it the same as adult 
recognition of number? Evidently it is not, for we find 
children quite unable to manage some of the relations 
with which we deal easily. But is this the only differ- 
ence between children and ourselves, that we can 
manipulate more relations than the children can? Is 
the difference merely one of the number of processes 
with which we are familiar? Do children and adults 
think in the same way about even those relations with 
Avhieh they both deal ? The answer to this question we 
are coming to understand in the light of our principle 



122 GENETIC PSYCHOLOGY FOR TEACHERS 

of development. Even when dealing with the same re- 
lation, children's modes of thought are not like ours. 
They are at a different level of development, and that 
different level of development means a different mode 
of thought. 

Thus, when the child first learns addition, the 
process does not have the same meaning for him as it 
does for the adult who knows the relation of addition 
to the higher process of multiplication. And when the 
child learns multiplication, the process does not have 
the same significance for him as it does for one who 
understands the use of logarithms. With each step in 
advance one sees richer and richer meanings in the 
processes which he half grasped in childhood. The man 
reads Eobinson Crusoe or Gulliver's Travels and sees, 
not only the story which interested the boy, but he sees 
the literary art and the deeper satire on social life. His 
view is, as we say, broader and fuller. This is what 
we expect of a developing individual. We apply differ- 
ent standards of judgment to different stages of mental 
life, and it is well that we should. The duty of the 
teacher is to recognize this as a sound principle of edu- 
cational practise. 

The general principle of differences in mental 
processes at different stages of development, opens up 
a whole series of questions for the teacher to investi- 
gate. How does the child deal with number relations, 
how does he read and write? The details of mental de- 
velopment call for investigation, for we understand as 
yet very little of the different stages through which 
children pass. Even memory of our experiences, as 
we have already pointed out, helps us but little in 



THE NEW IDEALS OF DEVELOPMENT 123 

understanding the details of development, for our own 
earlier experiences did not consist in attention to the 
processes of development. 

This leads us to a consideration of the fact that the 
child, though he is all the time developing, is wholly 
without knowledge of his own process of development. 
Take, for example, the child at play. We are coming to 
recognize the great importance of play for individual 
development. The child has weak muscles and organs 
of sense which have never had their full range of ex- 
perience. Nature does not send such an untrained 
child into the serious struggle of real life, but lets him 
spend a few years in a sort of sham struggle. This sham 
struggle the child takes in all seriousness, and enters 
into it with all enthusiasm — for him it is real life, 
though we call it his play. The child sees only the 
things with which he plays. He does not look be- 
yond the play and see the development for the future 
which he is getting. He just romps, and has a good 
time. There is nothing premeditated or reasoned out 
in his conduct. He is developing in what may be called 
the natural or wholly non-rational way. 

In calling the child's development non-rational we 
must make sure that the word non-rational is not mis- 
understood. ISTon-rational does not mean irrational or 
contrary to reason. The child may grow into an adult, 
and, looking back on his development, he will see how 
the struggles through which he has passed all con- 
tributed to his better adaptation. He will then recog- 
nize the reason for this or that impulse implanted in 
him by nature. He will see, for example, why nature 
gives to every child a play impulse. He will also come 



124 GENETIC PSYCHOLOGY FOR TEACHERS 

to understand why it was advantageous that this or that 
variation which he exhibited as a child should be 
checked before it became a burdensome habit. In 
other words, he will see as an adult, beyond the inrnie- 
diate facts which engaged his attention as a child. He 
will see beyond mere play, and discover that play is in 
reality a process of development; beyond the painful ex- 
perience he will later recognize nature's helpful lesson. 
In short, he will see how fully in accord with the prin- 
ciples of his reason it has all been. His development 
will thus appear as rational, though he did not know it 
before, and though he did not plan it — though it was 
wholly non-rational when it was actually taking place. 

Again, when we say that the child's development is 
unpremeditated and non-rational we conceive ourselves 
as standing in the child's position. From the teacher's 
point of view the child's development should not be 
non-rational. The teacher should know why play is 
good for the child. The teacher should always be con- 
sidering the process of development rather than the im- 
mediate facts of the child's experience. The teacher's 
place in the development of the child might be defined 
by saying that the teacher is a rationalizing factor — a 
kind of higher intelligence furnished the child to aid 
him in passing through the dangerous non-rational 
period of childhood. As the child takes step after step 
thoughtlessly and unknowingly, it is the duty of the 
teacher to stand by him and to prepare the way for each 
of these steps of development, so that nature may be 
siipplemented in bringing the child safely and well to 
maturity. 

Do we as teachers succeed in this rationalizino; of the 



THE NEW IDEALS OP DEVELOPMENT 125 

child's development? Let us ask this question specific- 
ally, with reference to one of the subjects that we shall 
take up later. Do we as teachers know how to develop 
the writing habit in children any more rationally than 
they themselves? Is not the writing lesson too often a 
blind struggle in which teacher and pupil unite in a 
sort of try, try again form of procedure, which never 
realizes whither it is leading? Is it rational to leave our 
children to work out their own educational salvations 
with a mere engraved copy to guide them? The copy 
merely shows them the end to be attained. Between 
their undeveloped efforts and that goal lie leagues after 
leagues of development. How shall they best find their 
way along that weary road? Who among us is ready to 
answer clearly? Who among us knows the steps by 
which fingers and arm and hand grow more and more 
responsive to the demands of brain and eye? Who 
among us is prepared to do his full duty until all these 
stages of development have become parts of his ration- 
alized knowledge? 

Such questions as these are questions that every 
teacher should face. They are the questions which arise 
the moment one realizes that the teacher stands by the 
child to rationalize the child's non-rational develop- 
ment. 

Another line of thought, which we may take up 
briefly, enforces very greatly the principle that the 
child's development is non-rational. It is the line of 
thought which grows out of a consideration of the facts 
of imitation. Modern science has given a good deal 
of attention to imitation. It is one of the means of 
transmitting habits from the older veneration to the 



126 GENETIC PSYCHOLOGY FOR TEACHERS 

younger. It is a cliannel of what we called a little 
while ago social inheritance. The infant sees its mother 
smile, and there spreads over the infant's face a re- 
flected smile. Do you suppose that the infant realizes 
that this is one of the means by which his development 
in the social habits of expression is being accomplished? 
Of course not. The infant just imitates in a Avholly 
unthinking, non-rational way, and the development goes 
on as nature has prescribed. 

We can understand this sort of unthinking imita- 
tion when we catch ourselves imitating a yawn that we 
saw a moment ago. Or let some member of our social 
circle set some fashion, either of conduct or of dress, 
how meekly we all follow! Fashion is the blindest, 
most non-rational thing in the world, and it owes its 
power to the trait of human nature which we are dis- 
cussing, namely, the tendency to imitate. 

The teacher does not need to be told that children 
are great imitators. For weeks after a Buffalo Bill 
show has been in town the boys will be lassoing posts, and 
small domestic animals, if not, indeed, passers-by. Let 
a company of soldiers pass through a city, and the boys 
will do nothing but think of military affairs during the 
next month. The girls, too, have their milder imita- 
tions, as one can see when some little six-year-old 
daintily prevents her perfectly safe skirts from getting 
into the dust of the crossing, by holding them as her 
seniors do theirs. And the teacher who recognizes this 
tendency toward imitation in children, recognizes also 
that it is wholly non-rational. The child does not sit 
in judgment on the habits of his elders. He simply fol- 
lows blindly whatever they do. Education would be 



THE NEW IDEALS OP DEVELOPMENT 127 

very far advanced if it did nothing but select and set 
before the children good examples for imitation. The 
teacher certainly can not afford to overlook the fact 
that blind non-rational imitation on the part of the 
child, places on the teacher a very heavy burden of re- 
sponsibility for the setting of clear-sighted, rational 
examples to be imitated. 

There is a final lesson which must be added to ti;is 
discussion of the non-rational character of the child's 
development. The child should not always remain 
non-rational in regard to his own development. He 
should gradually be brought to the stage where he can 
become his own rational guide, his own teacher. The 
educator who does not see to it that children are made 
independent of him, has not done his whole duty. And 
this process of rendering the child independent and 
rational is not a task to be undertaken suddenly at the 
end of school life. We used to think of graduation day 
as the commencement of independent self-guided con- 
duct. We are coming more and more to see that all 
along the course of the school life the lessons of de- 
velopment may be learned in two ways. First, non- 
rationally. That is nature's first method. And then as 
soon as some experience has been gained by nature's 
first method, this experience should be turned to ac- 
count in the development of a higher stage of mental 
life, and at that higher stage it will be possible to ad- 
vance not merely non-rationally, not merely by blind 
struggling, but also by self-conscious struggling, which 
is self-directed, rational conduct. 

There are other lessons that come to the teacher 
from the study of the principles of development. Some 



128 GENETIC PSYCHOLOGY FOR TEACHERS 

of these are of such importance that we shall be justi- 
fied in taking up another chapter in considering them. 
Tlien we shall pass on to some detail studies of how 
children develop in the lines which we try to cultivate 
in the schools. 

The main underlying thought which we have been 
working out in these first four chapters, should be 
clearly before you now. All mental life is of interest 
to us because it develops. The subtle changes in the 
processes of thought and perception which go to make 
up individual development, will escape us if we do not 
make them subjects of careful study. Even our own 
modes of thought are but half understood until we be- 
gin to look into their sources. If we will but have 
the courage to undertake this study of ourselves and of 
the ideals of our times, we shall see that just now we are 
taking up a large idea which is destined to modify our 
educational thought and methods more than they have 
ever before been modified in a single period of the 
world's history. This new idea, with all its derived 
principles, is the one which we are discussing — the idea 
of development. Get at this idea from many sides. 
Study your own development. Study the development 
of your pupils. Study the stages and ends of develop- 
ment. Recognize education as one phase of the broad 
process of development. 



CHAPTER V 

INDIVIDUALITY, ADAPTATION", AND EXPRESSION" 

In the last chapter we introduced the disc"ussion of 
the general principle of development, beginning with 
an illustration from biology, which served as the basis 
for the explanation of the terms variation, selection, 
transmission, and adaptation. We then pointed out 
how the doctrine of development disposed of the old dis- 
pute as to the goodness or badness of the child's nature. 
We called attention to the growing recognition in sci- 
ence and in practical education of the characteristic 
differences between different stages of mental develop- 
ment; and, finally, we concluded by pointing out the 
relation of the teacher, as a rationalizing factor, to the 
child's development, which, in its first stages, is wholly 
non-rational. 

The first new application of the general idea of de- 
velopment to which we now turn, grows out of a recogni- 
tion of the significance of the term variation. We have 
already seen that variation is the necessary first step in 
both individual and racial progress. And it is obvious 
also that the advantages or disadvantages of variation 
are most keenly felt by the individual, for where the 
variations are advantageous the individual is selected 
and becomes an important factor in turning develop- 
9 129 



130 GENETIC PSYCHOLOGY FOR TEACHERS 

ment in the direction of his own superior characteristics, 
and, conversely, where variations are disadvantageous 
tlie individual suffers, and is selected for elimination. 
In the same way where one institutes a new mode of 
action in his individual life, and thus produces what 
we have called a variation in individual action, selec- 
tion retains what is advantageous, and eliminates what 
is disadvantageous. And this process of selection goes 
on whether attended with pleasure or with pain. 

Judged from a narrow view of individual life, it 
seems hard at times to see a single human being suffer- 
ing the consequences of an unfortunate variation. In- 
deed, we have been passing, as a people, and as a body 
of teachers, through a period of thought in which we 
have rebelled against the mere suggestion that an in- 
dividual could be sacrificed for the larger good of the 
race. The principle that all men are created equal has 
seemed to us so eminently desirable an ideal with which 
to inspire one's efforts in life that we have held to it 
as one of the dearest dogmas of our democracy. We 
have held to it in a form in which human experience 
never justified our stating it. For if there is one thing 
that appears clearly in all human life, it is that in- 
dividuals are not born with like tastes or capacities. 
Men are differentiated through the appearance of in- 
evitable individual variations. Let men be equal be- 
fore the law all you please. Let them seek on a com- 
mon footing, even with equal opportunity, if you will, 
life, liberty and happiness, but their lives will be differ- 
ent, they will make different uses of their liberty, and 
their happiness will be of the most varying types. 

The doctrine of development did not discover this 



INDIVIDUALITY, ADAPTATION, AND EXPRESSION 131 

fact of the existence of variations, it simply pointed out 
the value of variations for development. We can now 
recognize in a clearly explained fashion the necessity of 
individual variations. Variations are the first steps in 
development, and without them the larger progress of 
the race and of the individual would be impossible. 
Our view of life thus expands so as to include not merely 
the moment when there is pleasure or pain from the 
selection, but so as to include also the remoter and final 
advantage from the whole process of consummated de- 
velopment. 

Gradually we are coming to accept a higher form of 
the idea of individuality. We are beginning to grasp 
the new idea in our school life. A few generations ago 
when our public schools were first organized, the chil- 
dren began at a certain age in the first grade and went 
on through the years of school life on the theory that 
they were always equal. Teachers knew that they were 
not equal, of course, but the theory was maintained. 
The theory was maintained sometimes in the expensive 
way of holding back some bright boy, or else of pushing 
some stupid boy forward. Teachers had no courage to 
face parents with the statement that all men are not 
created equal. So firmly were our schools based upon 
this principle of equality that to separate a child from 
'his fellows Avas a most noticeable fact. 

How different it is coming to be ! The school of 
to-day is striving for a new ideal of the child's in- 
dividuality. If a boy has variations that are advan- 
tageous to him, we recognize it. Most boys have some 
advantageous variations, and we see that it is the busi- 
ness of the schools to find these and give them the em- 



132 GENETIC PSYCHOLOGY FOR TEACHERS 

phasis they deserve. In short, the school is coming to 
recognize individuality as a mark of differentiation 
rather than as the stamp of uniformity. A boy or a girl 
is seen to have individuality when he or she does things 
in his or her own way. If that individual way is good 
we foster it, if it is bad we cut it off and develop a sub- 
stitute; for our work is to help make permanent the 
child's advantageous variations, and to eliminate his dis- 
advantageous variations. 

I need not dwell upon the changes in school or- 
ganization which exhibit this change in our attitude on 
the question of individual character. We are coming 
to promote children now as individuals, not in droves. 
We allow boys and girls to follow, before they leave the 
higher grades of our schools, some of the subjects that 
shall best develop their natural powers. But more 
significant than these external changes in organization, 
are the changes which show themselves in the class 
room in the individual teacher's ideals. To the old 
pedagogue every shivering child was but another unit, 
in his school attendance. Each pupil went through 
the same strenuous ordeal in the same way. The public 
school was, as some one so aptly put it, a great machine 
for polishing pebbles and taking the edges off diamonds. 
The teacher of to-day is, more and more, grasping the 
ideal of individuality, and school work is showing the 
results in a broader, more human relation between the 
teacher and each individual child. 

The broad way in which the ideal of individuality is 
being taken up is in no way better illustrated than it is 
in the clearness with which we recognize the harmony 
between our ideal of individuality and our ideal of edu- 



INDIVIDUALITY, ADAPTATION, AND EXPRESSION 133 

cation in classes. We never think of putting a boy off 
by himself with a tutor, as the highest form of instruc- 
tion. That is a treatment of individuality which seeks 
to draw the lines of exclusiveness about the boy. In- 
dividuality fostered by exclusiveness is not the kind of 
individuality we want. We want the boy to test the 
utility of his variations in contact with his fellows. 
We want him to profit by the advantages of imitation, 
and in this way to acquire some of the variations in 
action which originate with the other boys. In short, 
we know full well how to hold at once the ideal of 
social development and the ideal of individual develop- 
ment. We have the broader view of individuality, 
which means contact and relation with the world, not 
separateness. And so we are glad to put boys and girls 
into classes. We are sorry sometimes that the classes 
have to be so large, but better large classes pulsating 
with individual life than the rarefied atmosphere of the 
exclusive circle of an individual or two withdrawn from 
social contact. 

Coordinate with the individual, in our discussions 
of development, stands the environment. No one ever 
thinks of the process of development without recogni- 
zing the fact that the individual variations are selected 
and preserved or rejected because they either fit or do 
not fit a certain environment. You recall our earlier 
illustration of the ground mole with its broad fore- 
feet and weak eyes. These structures are fully de- 
veloped in the sense that they fit the environment in 
which the mole lives. Examined by themselves, out of 
relation to the environment, the eyes of the mole would 
be judged to be failures, and the feet would probably be 



134 GENETIC PSYCHOLOGY FOR TEACHERS 

considered clumsy. It is only when we recognize the 
fact that sensitive eyes would be worse than useless in 
the dark underground channels in which the mole lives, 
that we comprehend the reason for the line of backward 
growth of the eyes. But once we comprehend the re- 
lation of the mole to his environment, we see the rea- 
sons for it all. The failure of the eyes as eyes is entirely 
explained by the successful adaptation of these eyes to 
their particular environment. 

One way of putting this matter of relation to en- 
vironment is to point out that true development does 
not consist in mere refinement of functions for their 
own sake. Thus, if in contrast with the mole's eye, you 
examine the eye of the hawk or trout, you will find a 
very highly refined organ of vision. But you will have 
no reason for changing your verdict about the mole's 
eye in the presence of these examples of higher re- 
finement of vision. The mole's eye is adapted to the 
mole's environment, though it is not as highly refined 
an organ as is the hawk's eye or the eye of the trout. 

Or to transfer the discussion from the mole to hu- 
man life, we too have certain functions which are very 
little refined. Among the human senses, for example, 
smell and taste are notably defective as compared with 
the smell and taste of many of the animals. We have 
heard educators of rank assuming that development 
meant refinement, and deploring this lack of sensory 
refinement in the human race. Indeed, I know of one 
family where, through the persistent efforts of the 
father, the children have been so trained in the detec- 
tion and discrimination of odors that they can identify 
their friends in the dark through their keen olfactory 



INDIVIDUALITY, ADAPTATION, AND EXPRESSION 135 

sense. These children have a refined sense of smell. 
If refinement of tlie senses were the goal of education 
they would be far nearer that goal than most of us. 
But I venture to say that even before we have argued 
the matter out in detail, we shall all feel that human 
development has not been entirely wrong in its neglect 
of the senses of taste and smell. The truth is that even 
before men understood that true development meant 
adaptation rather than mere refinement, they had the 
word pedantry with which to characterize those forms of 
ultra-refinement which extended beyond all practical 
purposes. As for the deficient faculties which most of 
us cheerfully acknowledge in many directions — in smell 
and taste, for example — these are like the mole's eyes, 
faculties which we do not need in our lives. We should 
be distracted from the more important concerns of our 
environment if we were devoted to tastes and odors. 
'We live in a social environment where the sense of 
hearing gives us more important information than 
could possibly be obtained through the sense of smell. 
•A refinement of the sense of smell would be wholly 
useless to our ordinary mode of action and thought, 
and would be quite out of harmony with even our 
bodily structure. Did you ever notice that the ani- 
mals which have the most highly developed sense of 
smell are so constructed that the organ of that sense is 
carried close to the ground where alone it can be ad- 
vantageously used? Think of the dog or of the beasts 
of prey. And what have we as men to do with that 
ground environment? An African traveler tells us of 
a tribe of natives who rely much upon the sense of 
smell, which they have developed to a very high degree 



136 GENETIC PSYCHOLOGY FOR TEACHERS 

of perfection. But, he adds, they generally go on all 
fours when they are following a scent. 

Mere refinement of functions should never be the 
end of educational training. This has not always been 
recognized. There have been periods in the history of 
education when men devoted themselves so closely to the 
refinement of their use of classical Latin that they had 
no energy left for the real facts of their immediate en- 
vironments. There are teachers to-day who would 
rather get at some detail of the Revolutionary War than 
have an intelligent understanding of their duty as 
citizens in a great peaceful republic. There are pupils 
who are led to believe that arithmetic consists in those 
intricate puzzles which get nowhere on this earth, and 
have no value, unless, indeed, the refinement of arith- 
metical acumen beyond all degree can be defined as 
having value. 

There are certain difficulties in the application of 
this doctrine of adaptation, and we shall not overlook 
them. But before we come to these diificulties in the 
way of application of the doctrine to school work, let 
us pause for a moment and consider whether there is 
not a lesson for us as individuals in this principle of 
adaptation. How many of us are fully adapted to the 
environments in which we live? There is the young 
man or young woman, just out of one of the higher 
schools of the State, suddenly plunged into a farming 
community or into a small manufacturing or mining 
town. What is he or she equipped to do in such a com- 
munity? Generally the teacher is equipped only to 
enter into the details of this or that form of thought 
and study, such as mathematics, or Latin, or literature. 



INDIVIDUALITY, ADAPTATION, AND EXPRESSION 137 

Now, mark you, I have nothing to say against mathe- 
matics or Latin, or literature. The more the young 
teacher has of all these the better. But the trouble lies 
in the fact that this young teacher too often has no 
ambitions except to go on and on along these same 
lines. To use the technical phrase, the teacher is 
ambitious to refine more and more these particular 
forms of training. The doctrine of adaptation ought 
to come to such a young teacher with a new view of his 
duty to himself. There is nothing so worthy in life 
as to meet successfully the environment into which one 
is thrown. Even if you are going to outgrow this en- 
vironment very soon and go to another, do not deceive 
yourself into the thought that you do not owe it to 
yourself to fill this environment with a well-adapted 
personality. A teacher in a farming community who 
knows so much mathematics and literature that he can 
find nothing of interest in the scientific studies of soil 
and insect life which are engaging the attention of 
many of our scientists — such a teacher has begun re- 
fining functions without laying the broad foundation of 
adaptation. He will find that he is not a force in the 
community. He will be regarded as curious and foreign 
to the life of the people among whom he moves, and 
it will be his own fault. And when he leaves that com- 
munity, as he is very likely to, and goes to another, the 
probability that he will find a purely mathematical or 
literary environment is so small that it is ' safe to as- 
sume that he will again find himself an outsider. And 
with each successive move he will find his powers of 
adaptation growing smaller and smaller. 

This fact that we as teachers spend our lives pur- 



138 GENETIC PSYCHOLOGY FOR TEACHERS 

suing refinement of functions is what makes people 
look on our schools as out of date^ and it is a realization 
of the necessity of giving up the ideal of mere refine- 
ment for the broader ideal of adaptation^ which is 
fortunately shaking us out of our slumbers and setting 
us about a complete and thorough revision of our 
courses of study. Who is not familiar with the demand 
which is nowadays so frequently made that our school 
courses shall train boys and girls for life in the working 
world into which they are soon to pass? And who is 
not aware of the change in the spirit and content of our 
education, which is coming as a concession to this de- 
mand? We see the increase of practical courses in busi- 
ness methods and in manual training. We see the 
physical environment of the child presented in courses 
of nature-study. We see the social environment taken 
up in elementary civics and history. In short, the 
movement in all parts of the country and in all grades 
of schools is in the direction of adaptation of the child 
to his environment. 

Indeed, so overwhelmed are we with the new 
practical ideal of education that there is some danger 
of our failing to weigh carefully the true difficulties in 
the way of its application. Let us stop and ask our- 
selves what we mean when we speak of the child's en- 
vironment. Think, for example, of the boy, who, instead 
of the course in history, is given a course in business 
arithmetic. What is the interpretation of the principle 
of adaptation in such a case? The teacher has evidently 
said to himself, this boy is going into business. He will 
come into contact every day with business problems. 
The historical facts, on the other hand, are facts which 



INDIVIDUALITY, ADAPTATION, AND EXPRESSION 139 

lie far in the past, and will never enter directly into the 
boy's life. The conclusion seems to be direct, give the 
boy business arithmetic, and let history go. Again, here 
is a boy who will leave school at an early age and take 
up a trade. That boy does not need very much 
geography; he would be better off if his hands were 
trained in the use of tools. Let us give him manual 
training instead of geography. 

One of the clearest indications of our general ac- 
ceptance of the principle of adaptation is to be found in 
the fact that we are perfectly familiar in these days with 
such arguments in favor of business arithmetic and 
manual training. The argument does not shock us as 
it would have shocked our fathers. And yet I believe 
that most of us feel that there is something lacking in 
an ideal that is so directly and exclusively practical. We 
feel that the child's environment has been defined in too 
narrow terms when we see in the environment of the 
boy going into business merely the humdrum of com- 
mercial competitions and successes, or when we see in 
the environment of the laboring man merely his tools 
and his trade. One feels like saying, " Yes, let us 
recognize in our schools all these practical demands, 
but let us try to see more in the child's possibilities than 
is included in this narrow definition of environment." 
We feel, even where we do not see them clearly, some 
of the difficulties in the way of applying the principle 
of adaptation to our school work. 

Let us face the question that we have raised. What 
is the true environment of the child ? In the first place, 
we see more clearly to-day than ever before that the 
child must live a real life in the school and home com- 



140 GENETIC PSYCHOLOGY FOR TEACHERS 

munities in which he grows wp. Do we regard these as 
his true environment? In some sense, yes. We must 
treat of this immediate environment in our study of 
education. There are some teachers who have not yet 
waked up to this fact that they must pay attention to 
the life in the school and in the home. They think 
only of the large world which lies beyond the child's 
present grasp. They would distinguish between the 
child's immediate environment as transient and unim- 
portant, and the future environment in which the child 
is to live, and would consider the latter as the real en- 
vironment to be recognized in education. For such 
teachers, education is always an anticipatory adaptation 
to something yet unseen. On the other hand, there is 
fortunately an increasing group of educators who re- 
gard it as a mistake to think exclusively of the future. 
They would define the child's environment in such a 
way as to recognize very much more fully the present. 
Hear, for example, the words of Eousseau, where he 
says : ^ " What must we think, then, of that barbarous 
education which sacrifices the present to an uncertain 
future, which loads a child with chains of every sort, 
and begins by making him miserable in order to prepare 
for him, long in advance, some pretended happiness 
which it is probable he will never enjoy? " And, later, 
hear him lay down the positive side of his doctrine : ^ 
" The first education," he says, " ought to be purely 
negative. It consists not at all in teaching virtue and 
truth, but in sliielding the heart from vice, and the 



1 Payne's translation of Emile, p. 44. 

2 Ibid., pp. 59, 60. 



INDIVIDUALITY, ADAPTATION, AND EXPRESSION 141 

mind from error. If you could do nothing and allow 
nothing to be done^, if you could bring your pupil sound 
and robust to the age of twelve years without his being 
able to distinguish his right hand from his left — from 
your very first lessons the eyes of his understanding 
would be open to reason. Without prejudice and with- 
out habit, he would have nothing in him which could 
counteract the effects of your endeavors." Certainly 
this is an unambiguous plea for the school to think of 
itself as the child's true environment. To be sure, the 
present environment in such a school of negative edu- 
cation would not be a school with desks and black- 
boards. It would be rather a playground with objects 
of nature about the child. 

Conceiving of the child's immediate environment as 
rich in present experiences, there can be no doubt that 
our modern education is coming to give more and more 
attention to present adaptations. We show the chil- 
dren a plant and tell them how to cultivate it and use 
it. This is adaptation to the natural surroundings of 
the child, and it breaks in upon the monotony of ever 
preparing for the future as they used to in the school of 
yesterday. This is a step toward practical education. 

We see the schools of to-day taking up studies of 
domestic occupation, and of healthful recreation. We 
see the boys and girls trained in play and in physical 
exercise. To the old-fashioned educator all these activ- 
ities were too trivial for the school. The natural sur- 
roundings of the child were supposed to impress them- 
selves upon the child without any supervision, and the 
school concerned itself only with the remote future. 
Certainly we have gained much by these changes. 



142 GENETIC PSYCHOLOGY FOR TEACHERS 

In our high schools we see the same tendency. The 
school community organizes itself into athletic associa- 
tions, literary associations, and even into general gov- 
erning bodies controlling the whole life of the school. 
There is in all this a recognition of a real social en- 
vironment in the school itself, not in some remote social 
world of the future. This attention to preseiat ad- 
aptations is in keeping with the highest and best under- 
standing of development as a process of adaptation to 
environment, a part at least of that environment being 
the immediate surroundings. 

While we laud these efforts to bring about adapta- 
tion to the child's present environment, let us not fail to, 
see that there is danger that in the midst of all this 
attention to present environment there shall be no ade- 
quate recognition of the larger problem which unques- 
tionably lies beyond. For we all of us know that the 
child must some day live in an environment which is not 
like his present environment. We know that his present 
adaptations must be made the stepping-stones to the 
larger adaptations into which he is to rise. The mistake 
of the old education was that it neglected the present too 
much. The danger of our present S3^stem is that we 
shall make no explicit provision for the future. There 
is such a thing as studying occupations in the home city 
so long that the boy and girl shall have no adequate 
notion of the large world beyond. There is danger that 
plants and animals shall be studied to such an extent 
as to exclude the boy and girl from a thorough mastery 
of the elements of some of the less immediately appli- 
cable, but no less essential, adaptations of arithmetic 
and reading. We must not lose sight of the fact that 



INDIVIDUALITY, ADAPTATION, AND EXPRESSION 143 

adaptation to any given environment is never of the true 
type unless it leaves a certain amount of energy and 
attention free to go still higher and to seek out wider 
ranges of environment. 

The great difference between the lower grades of 
human and of animal life and the higher grades, is that 
the lower grades of life are limited in their adaptations 
to certain narrow environments. All these lower 
adaptations consist in changes due to direct individual 
contact with the facts to which one is adapted. Think 
first of animal adaptations. The ground mole, for ex- 
ample, develops a broad foot for digging. That is a 
direct adaptation, and it serves only to fasten the ani- 
mal to his narrow environment. The street gamin be- 
comes adapted in very much the same direct fashion to 
his environment. But direct adaptation is not the 
highest form of development. Man's adaptations at 
the present stage of development consist chiefly in in- 
direct adaptations. Thus, man has developed a variety 
of indirect devices for digging, and he does not need to 
develop individual bodily organs such as the mole has. 
Man may have a variety of methods of meeting the same 
situation. This makes possible the use of one mode 
of adaptation, while at the same time it permits the 
enlarged development of a higher, broader mode, with- 
out impairing the first. 

This is exactly what we should aim to recognize in 
our education. Suppose we want to train the boy to 
meet advantageously his relations to his physical en- 
vironment. The first and most available method is to 
bring him into direct contact with the natural objects 
which are a part of his immediate environment. This 



144 GENETIC PSYCHOLOGY FOR TEACHERS 

is the only way in which the animal or any undeveloped 
individual comes to know nature. But it is not the 
only, or even the most comprehensive way that man 
has, for man has, besides direct contact, a way of gath- 
ering into books observations from all over the world, 
and laying them before the boy. The boy can not go to 
Greenland or to the equator. If his only method of 
development were that of direct contact, he could not 
know nature in these remote regions. There is need, 
accordingly, of training in the indirect modes of knowl- 
edge. We recognize in present-day education that it 
is a great mistake to take the book method of bringing 
the boy into contact with nature before we use the 
direct method, for books are good to enlarge the boy's 
environment, but they do not constitute his most direct 
path of approach to immediate environment. Clearly 
the true method of training the boy is to give him 
first direct contact with nature and with the social life 
about him, and then give him the means of enlarging 
his natural environment by means of books. Do not 
become so absorbed in either direct environment or in 
the books that you neglect the other. The neglect of 
direct environment was the mistake of the bookish edu- 
cation of the past. The neglect of the more general, 
indirect means of adaptation through books, is one of 
the menacing dangers of our present devotion to direct 
adaptation. 

It ought to be clear through such discussions as 
these which we have been following, that man's develop- 
ment, while it has much in common with the lower 
forms of development, has a range which is immensely 
broader. The young animal endowed with the struc- 



INDIVIDUALITY, ADAPTATION, AND EXPRESSION 145 

tures of his species has only to grow up and come in 
contact with his social and physical environment, and 
exert himself in the regular activities of getting food 
and providing for himself and family, and his work in 
life is done and his development is complete. Such an 
animal has a narrow range of environment to which 
he is adapted, and in which he must live. A man might 
develop in very much the same way. The savage boy 
does, indeed, follow the same formula of education. 
And it looks very much as if the highest ambition of 
certain educators is to foist upon the human race this 
same formula of direct adaptation, as the highest defi- 
nition of education. The truth which these educators 
have is by no means to be overlooked. It is the great 
truth that, like the animal, the human being needs much 
direct adaptation. But there is the larger truth which 
must also be recognized. Man has multiplied vastly the 
range of his adaptations by the development of the 
power of indirect adaptation, and now a single man 
may come into contact with a vast environment and may 
fit himself to it. Spencer, at the close of one of his 
chapters, calls attention to this vast extension of hu- 
man environment in the following examples : ^ " From 
early races acquainted only with neighboring localities, 
up to modern geographers who specify the latitude and 
longitude of every place on the globe — from the ancient 
builders and metallurgists, knowing but surface deposits, 
up to the geologists of our day whose data in some cases 
enable them to describe the material existing at a depth 
never yet reached by the miner — from the savage barely 

^ Principles of Psychology, vol. i, p. 318. 
10 



146 GENETIC PSYCHOLOGY FOR TEACHERS 

able to say in how many days a full moon will return, 
up to the astronomer who ascertains the period of revo- 
lution of a double star — there has been a gradual widen- 
ing of the surrounding region throughout which the 
adjustment of inner to outer relations extends." 

The broad range of human adaptations, and of the 
human environment, is a fact which teachers should keep 
in mind as they try to work out the problem of school 
training. It is not full human adaptation when a car- 
penter is adapted merely to his bench and tools. It is 
not full human adaptation when the young man be- 
comes a cog in the wheel of business and nothing more. 
Our schools have a higher duty than mere commercial 
training. They have a larger task than to keep chil- 
dren at the level of the narrow-sighted present. They 
have it as their best function to prepare for the narrower 
and also for the broader adaptation. They should show 
the boy what is about him, and they should also show 
the boy how to reach what is beyond. 

Thus, we see that the acceptance of the principle of 
adaptation does not in any degree curtail the largest 
hopes or ambitions for school training. Let us not be 
narrowed by our new ideal. For while our new ideal is 
giving us much firmer ground to stand on, while it is 
clearing up for us the relation of school-life to the pres- 
ent, it is in no way lessening our duty to the future. 
Practical education as the lasts for liberal education is the 
true ideal. Never confound this with the false maxim 
that practical education is a substitute for liberal edu- 
cation. 

We have come back, as you will see, through this 
discussion of adaptation to environment, to the point 



INDIVIDUALITY, ADAPTATION, AND EXPRESSION 147 

at which we began our study of the idea of development. 
The ideal of adaptation is one which lays greatest stress 
upon activity, not receptivity. An individual adapted 
to his environment is not an individual who has pas- 
sively received something, he is rather an individual 
who has met his environment in an active way, and 
has fitted himself to that environment through his own 
exertions. The whole modern discussion of education 
is ringing with the word activity. We do not give chil- 
dren their mental development, we help them to get it 
through their own endeavors. We talk of expression 
and self-activity as the fundamental necessities for in- 
dividual development. And we have come to think of 
both mental and bodily activity as most intimately re- 
lated in working out the ends of individual development. 
Some of the facts which go to establish the relation 
between bodily and mental activities have been reviewed 
in an earlier chapter. Let us come back to the discus- 
sion with more facts to establish this relation and show 
its significance for development. 

Every one recognizes the importance of what we call 
attention. The children in the school are urged to give 
attention to this or that. Taken in a broad sense, at- 
tention to an object means making it a center of active 
adaptation. The boy is attending to the ball, which he 
tries to catch. In terms of his development this means 
that the boy is concentrating his whole nature for the 
time being on that ball, and is striving to fit himself 
and his ball environment to each other. Nothing could 
show better the completeness of this relation of atten- 
tion to adaptation than a study of the bodily conditions 
of attention. 



lis GENETIC PSYCHOLOGY FOR TEACHERS 

The bodily conditions of attention consist in a series 
of activities. In the first place, every sense organ fits 
itself by activity to the object of attention. Both eyes 
move in their sockets so as to look directly at the ob- 
ject. Within each eye, the fine muscles which control 
the lens are straining to get the lens in the best possible 
condition to give a clear, sharply defined image of the 
object. Even the head may be bent forward so as to 
"bring the eyes nearer the object, and at times we 
literally get up and move toward the center of attrac- 
tion. If the object is one that gives forth sounds, there 
is a similar adjustment of the ear. There is a contrac- 
tion of the little muscle which stretches the ear-drum 
so that one has a well-stretched receiving surface, sensi- 
tive to the slightest sound. The head is turned so as to 
bring the ear toward the source of sound, and one in- 
vestigator reports that he was able to demonstrate even 
in human beings, movements of the outer ear of the 
same type as those which we see very clearly in the 
animal, though these human ear movements were 
fortunately less intense and much less noticeable. 

The senses of taste and smell also have active adjust- 
ments. Thus, when we attend to tastes, the salivary 
glands become very active, and furnish the liquid in 
which to dissolve any substance coming to the mouth. 
This is an important active adjustment, for only fluids 
can affect the organs of taste. Similarly, when we 
attend to odors we snuff the wind and the nostrils dilate, 
even though we make little use of this sense. In the 
case of animals, of course, there are very noticeable 
movements accompanying the active turning of the 
senses of taste and smell upon a given object. 



INDIVIDUALITY, ADAPTATION, AND EXPRESSION 149 

The sense of touch is perhaps the most actively ad- 
justed of the senses. We can not attentively see or 
hear, or otherwise recognize the presence of an object, 
without making an active effort to grasp it. This 
active adjustment of touch has been suppressed in part 
through long periods of social training which forbids 
our seizing everything which we see, but the movement 
is there, nevertheless. Attach the hand to any delicate 
recording apparatus and you will see that it moves in 
the direction of any object of attention. Some persons 
have grown very skilful in leading others to the object 
of their attention by holding their hands. This so- 
called mind-reading, or better called muscle-reading, is 
by no means a difficult task. You can usually find in 
any party of five or six, some one who makes sufficiently 
intense movements of the hands toward objects of 
attention to become a suitable subject for even amateur 
muscle-reading. 

A great many experiments have been made to show 
the presence of involuntary hand movements toward 
objects of attention. Professor Jastrow has recorded ^ 
a series of experiments with the planchette, or writing 
board. A sheet of glass placed on rollers and having a 
tracer attached, is brought under the hand. The sub- 
ject without looking at his hand, thinks intently of 
reading across a page of print, or he recalls a poem, 
or thinks of a tower, and the hand moves noticeably, 
following the shifting of the attention. 

One of the best jDractical illustrations of hand move- 
ment following attention is to be found in the case of 

^ Fact and Fable hi Psychology. 



150 GENETIC PSYCHOLOGY FOR TEACHERS 

the learner on a bicycle. Let such a learner try to pass 
some approaching object which attracts his attention, 
and the chances are he will run into the very object 
which he was trying to avoid. The explanation is very 
simple. He could not help moving toward the object 
of his attention. The hand movement, which turned 
out so disastrously on his bicycle, would not have been 
noticed if he had been walking. But a hand movement 
when a hand is guiding a bicycle is a much more im- 
portant matter as the consequences showed. 

Attention means, as these facts indicate, the active 
concentration of the senses on the object attended to. 
But it means more than this. Have you not felt the 
mustering of all your vital forces as an essential part of 
the most intense attention? One holds his breath in 
order to keep his trunk muscles ready for action. One 
feels the muscles of legs and arms grow tense. The 
very beating of the heart stops, ready to begin again at 
a furious rate as soon as the suspense of waiting atten- 
tion shall give place to the attention of real action. All 
this shows how the mental state of attention is a process 
of active adaptation. 

Or turn the matter about and see what are the effects 
of activity upon the character of ideas. What part 
of the streets of your native town do you recall most 
clearly? Not the long, uninteresting stretches where 
you never stop. It is the corner where you make the 
turn, it is the house at which you are accustomed to 
stop, that you think of most clearly. These are the 
parts of the street which are of practical importance. 
They are the parts to which your actions are directed, 
and where action is directed there attention is directed. 



INDIVIDUALITY, ADAPTATION, AND EXPRESSION 151 

Nothing can be clearer than this conclusion that 
mental activity and bodily activity are both working 
toward the practical adaptation of the individual to his 
environment. The chief consideration in our present- 
day study of mental development is not the impression 
that goes in at the eyes or ears, but rather the way in 
which attention is adjusted to these impressions, and the 
way in which action is directed by attention. 

Again turn to that whole group of mental processes 
known as the emotions. A few years ago two scien- 
tists ^ advanced what was at that time a novel and 
bewildering proposition, namely, the proposition that 
the emotions are not conditioned merely . by impres- 
sions, but are conditioned also by the way in which the 
individual reacts to these impressions. There is much 
scientific truth, they said, in the old advice to keep up 
your courage by whistling, for no matter what your sur- 
roundings are, if you can act as if you were cheerful, you 
will find that your emotional state will correspond to 
your actions rather than to your impressions. This 
theory of the emotions, now known as the James-Lange 
theory, has leavened the whole lump of our psycholog- 
ical thought. We no longer think it strange that one 
should emphasize the active conditions of emotional 
life, or, indeed, that one should emphasize the active 
conditions of any phase of mental life. We are quite 
willing to accept in some form or other the proposition 
that action is quite as important as impression. 

All the careful experimental studies of the emotions 



^ Professor James and a Danish physiologist, Professor C. 
Lanse. 



152 GENETIC PSYCHOLOGY FOR TEACHERS 

recently made, go to show that the difJerent types of 
emotions are directly connected with different forms of 
action. Let us review one of the typical experiments. 
Train a blindfolded person to move the arm back and 
forth through any convenient distance, say, for exam- 
pie, a distance which measured at the fingers amounts 
to about a foot and a half. One can learn to make this 
movement with a good deal of uniformity. The move- 
ment depends on two groups of muscles: those which 
carry the arm outward and are called extensor muscles, 
and those which draw the arm inward and are called 
flexor muscles. Both extensor and flexor muscles are 
more or less active during the entire movement, even 
Avhen not drawing the arm in the direction of their 
special contraction. Suppose now that some influence 
should make the extensor muscles at the beginning of 
the movement tenser than usual, and should leave the 
flexor muscles unafi'ected. The result would be that 
the arm would move in the direction of the tense ex- 
tensor muscles easily, and in the opposite direction less 
easily. This is exactly what happens when one is given 
a pleasurable sensation of any sort. Give a person a 
sweet taste, for example, and you will find that his out- 
ward arm movements are longer than they normally 
were. These longer outward movements show that the 
extensor muscles are unusually tense. Conversely, if one 
gives the subject a bitter taste or a disagreeable sensa- 
tion of any sort, the flexor muscles will be unusually 
tense and the outward movements will be curtailed. 

Other experiments also confirm the general prin- 
ciple that all pleasurable experiences express them- 
selves in large expansive movements, or in tensions of 



INDIVIDUALITY, ADAPTATION, AND EXPRESSION 153 

the muscles favorable to such movements, while un- 
pleasurable experiences express themselves in contract- 
ing, withdrawing movements. And even passing from 
these to other forms of experience, we find everywhere 
the same characteristic fact, that each emotion has its 
characteristic motor conditions. 

The value of emotional reactions in the development 
of the individual can not de doubted. Darwin ^ was the 
first to attempt a detailed explanation of the utility of 
emotional reactions. Whether we agree with his 
analysis of the various emotions or not, we have to 
recognize the fact that he set the pattern for modern 
explanations of the emotions in that he sought to find 
their value for development. The great value of many 
of the human emotional expressions is probably to be 
found in their utility as means of social communica- 
tions. But some have other values as we see, for ex- 
ample, in the protective function of the emotional reac- 
tions which Avithdraw the body from disagreeable 
stimuli. Or again, the reaching out after objects which 
give pleasure is evidently in keeping with the general 
fact of development that in the great majority of cases 
pleasant experiences are favorable to individual life. 

These special groups of facts which appear when we 
study the active conditions of attention and of the emo- 
tions, are typical of all phases of development. If one 
wishes to understand individual development, he must 
study not merely the impression side of the individ- 
ual's life, he must study more especially the expression 
side. Impression is, of course, necessary to develop- 

1 Expression of the Emotions. 



154 GENETIC PSYCHOLOGY FOR TEACHERS 

merit. Impression is the means by which the environ- 
ment produces its first effect upon the individual. If 
an individual were not sensitive to his environment, the 
later adaptive process would be impossible. But im- 
pressions are present in superabundance at all stages 
of human life. So far as the sense-organs of the boys 
and girls in our schools are concerned, we have no reason 
to believe that they do not receive the same number 
and kind of impressions that our own sense-organs re- 
ceive. Nature has thus provided that the environment 
shall produce its first efl^ects, long before the boys and 
girls can fully make use of these impressions. The raw 
materials for adaptation, the impressions, are there very 
early, waiting for the individual gradually to adjust 
himself to them. 

The active adjustments of oneself to impressions is 
the real adaptive process. All the sensations must be 
distinguished from each other and the individual must 
learn how to react to each impression. Certain groups 
of impressions must be treated in groups, not because 
they are alike as impressions, but because they are all 
objects of a single form of reaction. In short, so far 
as this raw material for development which presents 
itself in the form of impressions is concerned, it must 
all be worked over and connected with individual re- 
actions before it can be regarded as really assimilated by 
the developing individual. 

Take the form of training which we call sensory 
training in the schools. We present certain sense 
stimuli, such as colors, and sounds, and sensations of 
touch. Do we do this for the sake of developing the re- 
ceiving organs? Not if we understand the process 



INDIVIDUALITY, ADAPTATION, AND EXPRESSION 155 

aright. The colors that fall on the eyes, the sounds 
that fall on the ears, are all received, so far as mere 
reception is concerned, by organs that were given to 
the individual through the development of the race. 
The individual life is too short a span in which to 
modify appreciably the development of eye or ear as 
sensitive organs. This appears in the fact that certain 
eyes which are defective in sensitivity, the color-blind 
eyes as we call them, can not be improved by individual 
development. Indeed, it often requires two or three 
generations of fusion with well-developed individuals to 
correct color-blindness, so thoroughly is the condition 
of the sensory organ determined before individual de- 
velopment begins. Individual development begins at 
the point where racial development ends. Our sensory 
training takes the sensory impressions after they are 
received, and, first of all, sharply discriminates them, 
and then organizes them. 

Discrimination is not a process of impression. How 
often one has heard two sounds, for example, two sounds 
in a foreign language, and has confounded' them. When 
we hear Chinese, for instance, or even French, if we do 
not understand it, the sounds all seem to run together 
in a confused mass. The different sounds are there so 
far as the receiving process is concerned, but we do 
not discriminate them. Kow, instead of merely listen- 
ing to these sounds, begin to try to reproduce them. 
That is, change from the attitude of impression to the 
attitude of expression, and as you try to fit your active 
life to each of the different impressions, you begin to 
discriminate and recognize. In other words, you begin 
to have more than the mere impression, you begin to 



156 GENETIC PSYCHOLOGY FOR TEACHERS 

have recognized impressions. This is sensory training. 
It is not training of tlie sense-organs, it is training in 
discrimination and in reaction to sensory impressions. 

Nowhere does the relation of mental development 
to activity appear more clearly than it does in the 
unities which we build up in experience and call ideas. 
Every experience of visual or auditory recognition is, 
on its impression side, a complex. Every object at 
which we loolc, makes a series of impressions upon 
us. But we do not get an idea which is broken up 
into parts. We see things in the same unitary way 
as that in which we react to them. The fact that our 
action and thought are adapted to unitary objects rather 
than to single attributes of objects, is evidence of a 
close relation between ideas and actions, not be- 
tween ideas and impressions. Thus, when we look at 
a piece of iron, the sensory stimulation received by 
the eye is not separated in our action or in our thought 
from the other attributes of the object. The color 
fuses in our idea with the weight, and the weight fuses 
with the roughness and coldness, and altogether we act 
toward the piece of iron as toward a single object, not 
as toward a group of colors, weights, roughnesses, and 
temperatures. The action and the idea correspond in 
that they are both unitary complexes containing in 
modified form the net results of all the varied sensory 
antecedents. 

Striking parallels can also be found between the 
more complex unities of consciousness and action. 
Thus, take the case of the piano-player. At first his 
activities are a series of single, separate responses to 
separate notes. But later he strikes a whole chord in 



INDIVIDUALITY, ADAPTATION, AND EXPRESSION 157 

a single moment. Or take the singer; one may be able 
to sing each note of the scale separately and not be able 
to sing even a simple line of music. What must be 
learned in these cases? It is the combination of the 
elementary movements into new wholes, so far as the 
action is concerned. And when such combinations of 
activities are once established, we have corresponding 
complex ideas. The ideas of a musical chord, and of a 
vocal transition, are to the trained mind, unitary wholes, 
not mere aggregates of impression elements. And 
while these wholes contain, in a certain sense, the diifer- 
ent sensory elements, they are in a much larger and 
more important sense, unitary processes with character- 
istics depending upon the fact that the elements are 
united into a single idea. 

We have, however, dwelt long enough on these 
illustrations. The general principle to which they all 
lead is the general principle that development is 
adaptation, and adaptation is an active process. The 
individual has many functions, but all these functions 
cooperate in his higher and higher development, and 
that means that they all cooperate in working out 
more and more adequate forms of activity. 

These, then, are some of the new ideals that are 
growing up in our education. We shall be blind to our 
own individual advantage if we do not see that the 
new spirit which springs from these new modes of 
thought is worthy of our individual study and accept- 
ance. We shall be equally blind to our own advantage 
if we do not see that we can not fully grasp the newer 
spirit without understanding the fundamental ideas 
which underlie it. 



158 GENETIC PSYCHOLOGY FOR TEACHERS 

There is a good deal of doubt in the minds of some 
teachers as to the value of their taking up some of 
these general lines of consideration. Give us methods 
and devices, they say. Let the leaders in education, let 
the superintendents, if you please, work out the larger 
problems and give us the result. But this is an idle 
demand. The method may be ever so perfect, the 
device may be ever so well wrought out, and yet fail 
unless administered in a right spirit, and the spirit can 
never be cultivated by mere superficial imitation. 

Our educational life is full of dangerous opportuni- 
ties to cultivate false and superficial ideals. Teachers 
are, as we have already said, more than most people 
dependent on their ideals. And especially at this period 
when the air is full of pedagogical doctrines from the 
North and from the South, from the East and especially 
from the West, it behooves each one of us to have a real, 
genuine ideal to save us from errors. 

The history of the past has been a history of vague 
striving after such safe ideals. Men have borrowed 
their ideals from the church, from their philosophy, 
from their neighbors, from their teachers, who in turn 
borrowed their ideals from earlier teachers. Slowly the 
struggle has gone on and has brought us to these times. 
Here again there is large opportunity to borrow if we 
are so disposed. The traditions of the schools are ever 
present as fertile suggestions. The suggestions of our 
neighbors are offered even more freely than in former 
times. We may borrow; but you know the result of 
such borrowing. We can not borrow any more as they 
used to in the good old days, for we are in an age of 
rapid progress ; the next piece of borrowing that we try. 



INDIVIDUALITY, ADAPTATION, AND EXPRESSION 159 

may upset our whole system. It is the blind borrow- 
ing of ideals that makes the teacher of this genera- 
tion anxious and worried. It is the Babel of tongues 
without any single voice of authority, and this is what 
makes us feel confused. What is to be the relief? Are 
you going to wait until some one shall come and silence 
all this wrangling? If so you have a long dreary life 
ahead of you. There is to be much discussion of edu- 
cational doctrines from this day on. You can not 
silence it or suppress it. The thing for you to do is, 
prepare to meet it. Have some ideal of your own. Get 
a broad principle, and then enter into the active discus- 
sion of details yourselves, and be, each one of you, a 
factor in the educational thought, not a confused out- 
sider. 

This is certainly not too large a demand to make 
upon our teachers. I do not suggest that you try to 
write articles for the educational reviews. That seems 
to be a dangerous sort of dissipation at the present 
time. I do not even suggest that you write a book. I 
certainly do not ask j^ou to read all the books. But I 
do ask that before 5^ou let yourself adopt a plan of work 
in your classes, you consider some of the reasons for 
your plan. If it is writing that you intend to teach, or 
reading, or arithmetic, do not simply go ahead without 
any consideration of what is the value of this study 
for the boys and girls. Do not enter upon a lesson Avith- 
out thinking over its aims and purposes. You try to 
make the boys and girls think about what they are going 
to do before they do it, why should you not think about 
what you do? 

And so I bring this general discussion to a close with 



160 GENETIC PSYCHOLOGY FOR TEACHERS 

an urgent recommendation to j^ou that each one of you 
think himself or herself into the modern view of educa- 
tion. There is not one of you who could not, and should 
not, understand the main outlines of this broad and 
fruitful idea of development. It is an idea that will 
illuminate your whole work. It will make it easy for 
you to understand that children improve slowly. It will 
give you a new spirit of tolerance of their undeveloped 
states. It will give you a broader ideal of the purpose 
of education and its relation to the other phases of the 
child's life. And above all it will give you a basis on 
which to build your methods, and it will give you sug- 
gestions as to the particular problems which you should 
take up for further investigation. 



CHAPTER VI 

THE teacher's WRITING HABIT 

In the preceding chapters we treated of some of 
the general characteristics of our mental lives and of 
some of the general ideals which influence us in our 
work as teachers. We turn now for a time to more 
special topics. How we write, and read, and use num- 
bers, are the topics to which I shall now ask you to 
direct your attention. These are, in a general way, 
certainly not new subjects, and I am well aware that 
you have, before we enter upon the discussion, a good 
many valuable ideas on how children should learn to 
write and read and use numbers. But I wish we 
might set aside for a little time all that we know about 
how children should do these things and might ap- 
proach the familiar subjects from a somewhat different 
point of view — the point of view of our teacher-study. 
How do you and I actually behave when we write? 
This is a somewhat different question from the one 
with which we are more familiar, the question which 
asks how we shall teach children to write. 

Our question is one of self-study. It is not espe- 
cially a question of self-examination, for I do not wish 
you to examine your writing with a view to comparing 
it with some copper-plate model. I wish rather to 
11 161 



162 GENETIC PSYCHOLOGY FOR TEACHERS 

induce you to stop and think that you, as a trained 
adult, have the habit which your children are working 
most earnestly to acquire. You, as a trained adult, 
can take a pen or a pencil, or a piece of crayon; and 
you can, rapidly and without apparent effort, express 
ideas by means of written symbols. What is this habit 
of which you have such complete control ? It certainly 
is not an abstract or theoretical affair. There is a very 
great deal of your concrete personality involved in it. 
Did you ever stop in the midst of all your pedagogical 
struggles to think that in writing, as in many other 
respects, you are your own best subject for study ? Did 
you ever think that when you sit down and study this, or 
that so-called system of penmanship, you are studying 
something very remote and abstract, something that 
contains very little of the human beings who have to 
produce such letters and use them in real life? I wish 
I might draw your attention to the habit of writing as 
a human performance, to your own habits in writing 
as profoundly interesting illustrations of what educa- 
tion is aiming at. For, if I mistake not, education 
aims to cultivate human habits of thought and expres- 
sion — not forms and symbols. One of the troubles 
with our teaching of writing has been that we have 
had our eyes too much on the lifeless, material paper 
and ink, and not enough on the pulsating human being 
back of these material things. The habit of writing is 
not to be found in lines on paper — it is in human 
beings. 

Perliaps it will not be amiss for me, as we enter 
upon this study of ourselves and of our ability to write, 
to assure you that this is no subtle scheme by whicli 



THE TEACHER'S WRITING HABIT 163 

to induce you to accept some new form of penmanship. 
I solemnly promise not to turn out to be an advocate 
of some new series of writing books, or even a repre- 
sentative of one of the publishers now dealing in wri- 
ting books. If I were to give an opinion growing out 
of a careful perusal of a good deal of what has been 
written for teachers on the subject of writing, I should 
not hesitate to say that the multiplication of new wri- 
ting' books and the multiplication of pamphlets and 
even volumes in support of these numerous systems of 
penmanship, must be recognized as very largely account- 
able for the deflection of ike attention of teachers from 
the really important C[uestions of the nature of writing 
habits, to the less essential and often wholly unessen- 
tial characteristics of this or that system of copies. Let 
us agree, then, that this is not a study of systems of 
penmanship, but a study of the nature of the writing 
habit, beginning with a careful examination of devel- 
oped writing as exhibited in the teacher. 

Writing involves as its most obvious factor a com- 
plex muscular movement. Our study of developed wri- 
ting may well begin with this obvious factor. One 
does not need to know very much about the muscles 
of the hand and arm to recognize the fact that there 
are a great many of these muscles involved in writing. 
Thus, one must carry his hand across the page on which 
he writes. This movement across the page is performed 
by the larger muscles of the arm. It is a movement in 
the shoulder- joint and at the elbow. This movement 
is very different, in regard to the muscles which it in- 
volves, from the finer finger movements which ordi- 
narily make the pen-strokes. I say ordinarily, for 



164 GENETIC PSYCHOLOGY FOR TEACHERS 

there are, of course, certain special modes of writing 
in which all the movements are arm movements. And 
even if one insists on talking about these relatively 
unusual forms of arm-movement writing, the same gen- 
eral proposition is true. The lateral movements across 
the page are different in character and in the muscles 
employed from the rotary movements by which the 
letters are formed. 

When one begins to notice this fact, that writing 
movements are made up of a number of different fac- 
tors, he begins to notice in the same connection that 
all the different factors fit each other perfectly. The 
finer pen-strokes and the movements of the arm across 
the page do not interfere with each other. The arm 
muscles do not contract too soon, but wait until the 
finger-work is done, and then easily and fluently, with- 
out our noticing that an entirely new movement is being 
woven into the total complex of action, the arm mus- 
cles carry the hand forward to a new point where new 
pen-strokes are to be executed. 

Or consider the ordinary finger movements by 
means of which most of us make the pen-strokes. It 
will be clear to you after a little observation, that the 
thumb does not perform the same kind of movement 
as the first finger, and that the middle finger does not 
perform the same movements as either thumb or first 
finger. The first finger makes the downward strokes. 
In these downward strokes the thumb and middle fin- 
ger simply guide the downward movement and give to 
it its inward and outward curves. The returning up- 
ward strokes of the pen are very largely the work of 
the thumb. The guiding of the upward movements is 



THE TEACHER'S WRITINa HABIT 165 

the work of the first finger and the middle finger. Put 
in a general way, one can say that thumb and first fin- 
ger do most of the active work in the upward and down- 
ward pen-strokes, while the guiding of these strokes 
is the complex result of the cooperation of all three 
fingers. 

The cooperation of the three fingers is, like the 
larger cooperation of the arm and fingers, so nicely 
adjusted that we do not notice the complexity of the 
movement in ordinary experience. We should ordina- 
rily describe the stroke of the pen as a single movement. 
It is in one sense of the word a single movement, but 
it is single only in the sense that its factors, which are 
many, are perfectly fused so that there is no inter- 
ference or lack of harmony. The various muscles are 
perfectly timed to each other and perfectly regulated 
with respect to intensity of action. 

All this cooperation of the different muscles must, 
of course, be due to some controlling system which 
sends to each muscle at the appropriate moment the 
proper command to act. The muscles themselves have 
no power of uniting with each other. They are sepa- 
rate organs. Their cooperation is due to the nervous 
center with which they are all connected. And so our 
first consideration of the external muscular movements 
in writing, leads us to a study of the way in which these 
movements are controlled and initiated. 

Every muscle is supplied with a delicate nerve-fiber. 
You know enough about nerves and their connections 
so that we need not go into any extended discussion, 
here of the details of nervous structure. No muscle 
ever moves except as it is aroused to action by its 



166 GENETIC PSYCHOLOGY FOR TEACHERS 

nerve-fiber; and no nerve-fiber ever arouses a muscle 
except as it receives its impulse in turn from the brain. 
When, now, we find a group of muscles acting in per- 
fect harmony, as do the writing muscles, we can explain 
that harmony by the fact that in the brain there is a 
group of nerve-cells all connected with each other and 
so organized that they produce from a single region the 
combined harmonious action of the different muscles. 
We speak of this organized group of cells as the center 
of muscular coordination. And by muscular coordina- 
tion we mean the fact of cooperation which we described 
a moment ago. 

Developed writing movements depend, then, on the 
existence of a group of bralD -cells which are intercon- 
nected and interrelated in a most complex way. The 
growth of this series of interconnections between the 
cells was a process that required time and practise. At 
the beginning of this practise each cell acted in a large 
measure apart from its fellows, and there was no well- 
organized cooperation, or muscular coordination as Ave 
have learned to call it. 

One can get a notion of what the condition of things 
must have been before the cells became organized, 
through certain disorganizing experiences which one 
has in adult life. Suppose you are writing and a sud- 
den peal of thunder sounds in your ears. You know 
the result. Your pen flies off in some unexpected direc- 
tion, spoiling the line you were just about to complete. 
Even a milder noise than thunder will often make one 
start and spoil a pen-stroke. These failures of the 
writing muscles to cooperate in the usual fashion when 
one hears loud, sharp sounds, are explained by the fact 



THE TEACHER'S WRITING HABIT 167 

that the thunder, or the other loud noise sounding in 
one's ears, sends into the brain very strong excitations 
which stir up the whole brain. The excitation is so 
great that it does not resjDect the usual channels of 
well-organized discharge into the muscles. Instead of 
flowing out as a well-coordinated impulse, this strong 
stimulation leaps forward on its own arbitrary paths, 
and those cells which it excites most intensely simply 
break away from the system to which they belong and 
act independently of the system, just as in earlier times 
they acted independently because the system was yet 
unformed. This independent action of certain nerve- 
cells breaks up immediately the harmony of the move- 
ment. We see the value of the ordinary coordination in 
contrast with this lack of coordination. 

Nothing could be more instructive for the teacher 
than to study these irregular movements which are 
made under the influence of some sudden, strong stimu- 
lation. You find it impossible to make a regular move- 
ment under these conditions. If some one should, at 
such a time, preach you a long sermon on making the 
letter correctly, it would not help matters any. The 
fact is, the wrong movement was due to a lack of abil- 
ity to make the right movement. The machinery of 
coordination broke down at that instant and the false 
movement appeared. Now you know how to sympa- 
thize with your pupil whose machinery of movement 
has a good many weak points. Impulses go astray in 
your pupil's nervous center because the center is not 
completely organized. It does no good to preach to 
him about correct movement — at least, if you preach 
to him in the spirit of blaming him for the wrong 



168 GENETIC PSYCHOLOGY FOR TEACHERS 

movement at the wrong time. He does not choose the 
wrong movement. He has before him a problem very 
difficult for us to understand, namely, the problem of 
making any movement that shall even approach what 
you want and what he wants. 

There is another kind of experience in adult life 
which will help us still further in our effort to compre- 
hend what is meant by a coordinated movement. Think 
of a movement which even in adult life is wholly unor- 
ganized. There are muscles in our bodies which are 
supplied with nerve-fibers but which we have never 
learned to use. For the sake of understanding the 
child's feelings about his writing lesson, try sometime 
to write with your own undeveloped muscles in your 
feet. This is not an absurd proposition by any means. 
There are a great many people in this world who, for 
one reason or another, have learned to use the feet very 
dexterously, and some have even learned to write with 
them. Of course the feet are not as well adapted to 
fine work of this kind as are the hands, but if you will 
make the trial you will find that your immediate diffi- 
culty is not that there is a lack of muscular activity, 
or even that there is a lack of general adaptation of 
the organ to this kind of movement. There will be 
movement enough and to spare, and there will be 
movement which, if trained, would do the work very 
well. The first fact which you will discover is that 
the movements which are present, are not coordinated. 
They are not under control. A little experience will 
show you how hopeless it is to try to do anything with 
these untrained movements except through patient 
practise. You must have the nervous organization 



THE TEACHER'S WRITING HABIT 169 

before you can have the coordinated movement. And 
this is exactly what is true of the muscles of the child's 
fingers, hand, and arms. 

If, now, the general character of the writing move- 
ment, as a coordinated movement, made up of many 
factors, is clear to you through these contrasts, we may 
turn to the study of some of the characteristic forms of 
writing movement. It is obvious, of course, to all of 
us that there are great individual differences in writing 
movements, and it is also true, as we shall see, that the 
explanation of these individual differences must be 
sought in the individual modes of coordinating move- 
ments. It is not chiefly, if indeed it is at all, differences 
in the shape or size of the hand, or differences in the 
character of the writing materials, which determine 
these individual differences. The way in which one 
writes will be determined in a measure by the materials 
which he uses and by the strength and shape of his 
muscles. But these are very secondary factors. The 
chief consideration is the nervous organization which 
controls the coordination of the muscles. In other 
words, one's individual writing is the expression of 
his individual habit of movement. His hand may be 
large and strong, but if writing is for him a series 
of fine delicate coordinations, then his writing will not 
show the size or strength of his hand, but will express 
rather, by its fine delicate lines, the character of the 
coordination. 

We can see even by superficial examination of a 
number of adults that their habits of movement are 
very different. Ask two persons to sit before you and 
to write a given word over and over again, and watch 



170 GENETIC PSYCHOLOGY FOR TEACHERS 

their hands and arms and compare their modes of 
movement. You could tell that the products of these 
movements must be different from the very fact that 
there are such noticeable differences in the movements. 
But we shall not be satisfied with this superficial obser- 
vation of what can be seen directly. Let us resort to 
a thoroughgoing experimental analysis of a number of 
individual coordinations. 

Such an experimental analysis is not difficult, at 
least in so far as the grosser coordination between the 
arm movements and other movements is concerned. 
One can arrange a tracer in such a way that while one 
is writing as usual with the fingers, the tracer shall 
record, not what the fingers do, but only what the 
hand as a whole does. All that is necessary in order to 
make such a tracer, is first to find some part of the 
hand that does not participate in the finger movements. 
Such a part of the hand is, for example, the hand 
bone, or so-called metacarpal bone, just back of the 
little finger. This metacarpal bone moves every time 
the hand moves, but it has no part in the movements 
of the thumb and first two fingers. A simple tracer 
of the sort represented in Fig. 14 is fastened to this 
bone. 

The tracer consists of a spring (J.) which fits closely 
on the hand and carries the light rod (B-B) which 
runs forward far enough so that the distance of its 
end from the wrist and elbow is the same as the dis- 
tance from the wrist and elbow of the pen held by the 
thiimb and first finger. This equality in length en- 
sures a record of the hand movement which is on 
the same scale as the writing, and thus comparison 



THE TEACHER'S WRITING HABIT 



171 




Fig. 14. 



is made direct and easy. At the end of this rod is 
placed a perpendicular glass tube (C), and through 
this falls a closely fitting pencil {D-D). The record in 
any given ease is made by writing naturally and al- 
lowing this tracer, 

which is fastened ^ IIU-Z) 

to the hand during 
the writings to 
make a record on 
the same paper as 
that which receives 
the writing. The 
written letters are 
the records of fin- 
ger movements plus 
all the hand and 
arm movements, except such hand and arm move- 
ments as are made during the intervals between words, 
when, of course, the Avriting pen is raised from the 
paper. The tracer-pencil is kept by its own weight 
constantly on the paper, and records all that the hand 
and arm do, but nothing of the pure finger movements. 
By a comparison of the written letters and the tracer- 
record we can therefore easily determine what part of 
the whole work is done by the arm and hand and what 
part is done by the fingers. 

A large number of records have been taken by means 
of such a tracer. Many of them were made by teachers, 
so that we may use the results directly in our study. 
Of course your individual record would not be exactly 
like any one of the records which I have to show. But 
out of the many records which I have taken, I have 



172 GENETIC PSYCHOLOGY FOR TEACHERS 

selected examples which seem to illustrate the general 
types of handwriting, and so your general type of wri- 
ting is doubtless here represented. 

The first typical record which we shall take up for 
detailed study is shown in Fig. 15. The letters written 

12 34^ 5 6 7 8 9 /2„ 

I \ 

10 11 



Fig. 15. 



appear on the left, and the tracer-record on the right. 
The points which correspond to each other in the two 
parts of the figure are similarly numbered. The most 
obvious fact is that the hand participated only in the 
forward movements, while the fingers did all of the finer 
work in forming the letters. Thus, the lines between 
1 and 3 in the tracer-record represent the whole move- 
ment of the hand during the writing of the letter I 
and the first stroke of the letter e. A still more stri- 
king illustration of the relation between hand move- 
ments and finger movements is found in the case of the 
letter a. From 6 to 8 in the tracer-record, we have the 
total movement of the hand from the top of I to the top 
of the next succeeding I. The movement 6-7 in the 
tracer-record, represents the part played by the hand 
in making the downward stroke of the I and in carry- 
ing the fingers forward to the position from which they 
did the larger part of the work of forming the a. If 



THE TEACHER'S WRITING HABIT 173 

6-7 is contrasted with 2-3, which represents a similar 
movement from the top of an I to the top of its next 
succeeding letter, which was in that case e, a very char- 
acteristic fact in all hand movements will be observed. 
It is the fact that in most cases the hand does its part 
in the formation of a letter before the fingers begin 
their finer formative work. Coming back now to the a, 
we see that after making the long movement 6-7, the 
hand participated in the completion of the a only to the 
extent indicated by the line 7-11. The point 11 is 
somewhat less definite in its location than are the otlier 
points, and is consequently indicated below, rather than 
above the line. 

Another important feature of this tracer-record ap- 
pears in the differences in slope of the three parts 1-10, 
10-5, and 5-9. The part 1-10 indicates the movement 
of the hand during the writing of the first group of let- 
ters. Its slope indicates that the hand executed a con- 
siderable movement from left to right on its own 
center in the Avrist. During the pause between the 
writing of the two groups of letters, an entirely differ- 
ent form of movement was executed, as is shown by 
the new slope in the line 10-5. In the first place, the 
slope indicates that this movement was made from an 
entirely different center. It was indeed an arm move- 
ment centered at the elbow, instead of at the wrist, as 
was the movement 1-10. But it also included a wrist 
movement from right to left, as is indicated by the 
convex form of the line just before 5. The interval 
between the groups of letters was, accordingly, em- 
ployed in executing an arm movement which carried 
the hand forward, and in executing a backward wrist 



174 GENETIC PSYCHOLOGY FOR TEACHERS 

movement M^hich prepared the hand for the new series 
of forward movements which we find recorded from 
5-9. Tliis new series was made up again of wrist move- 
ments from left to right. 

Fig. 16, from a different writer, presents a some- 
Avhat different type of coordination. Here the hand 




Ul^ R— ^^^ 



FiQ. 16. 

movement during the writing of the letter was much 
less than in the case of the first subject. The arm 
movements were longer and freer. The hand and fin- 
gers were carried forward by the arm during the inter- 
vals between words, to positions corresponding to the 
middle of the word to be written, and then the fingers 
executed the major part of the writing movement. 

This is, because of the limited amount of hand move- 
ment, a very excellent illustration of the relation of 
liand movement to the word. Any group of letters 
which is written with a single progressive hand move- 
ment, as were these groups in the figure, will be seen 
to have a kind of unity which can not be overlooked. 
It is not the unity of a single letter, to be sure, but it 
is a higher form of complex unity. It should be noted 
also that such hand movement units are not always co- 



THE TEACHER'S WRITING HABIT 175 

extensive with single words. A long, complex word is 
often broken up into two, or even three, such hand 
movement units with a regular arm movement between. 
Sometimes, on the other hand, two short words are 
united into a single continuous phrase and are written 
with a single unitary hand movement. 

Eecords essentially identical with the one repro- 
duced in Fig. 16 were secured from a number of per- 
sons who wrote " round " letters, and from every case 
investigated in which the writing was of the type known 
as vertical. There is, accordingly, ground, as far as 
these cases are concerned, for the statement that broad, 
round letters, indicate a preponderance of finger move- 
ment. 

While the relative importance of the various move- 
ments is different in the cases reproduced in Figs. 15 
and 16, yet the same general statement which was made 
in the analysis of Fig. 15 can be repeated for Fig. 16: 
the function of the hand is to participate only in the 
forward movements, while the fingers do the work of 
constructing the letters, and the arm acts chiefly in the 
intervals between words in such a way as to carry the 
hand forward. It is only necessary to note that in this 
second case special emphasis is given to the constructive 
finger movements which have a relatively larger part to 
perform than they had in the first case. 

A third type of record is reproduced in Fig. 17. 
This record shows a very pronounced preponderance of 
arm movements. The movements recorded in 1-6 and 
7-11 differ little in slope from the recognized arm rec- 
ord between 6 and 7. The hand reproduces the letters 
in much more detail than in the other cases, because 



176 GENETIC PSYCHOLOGY FOR TEACHERS 



it is carried along in the process of writing by a general 
arm movement. To be sure, the finer details of the let- 
ters are here, as before, formed by the fingers, but 
there is more of the general work done by the hand, and 
arm muscles. The writing here reproduced is obviously 
bolder and more angular than that in the earlier rec- 
ords. This writing is typical of a whole group of cases 

1234 56789 10 11 



12 3 4 5 6 7 8 910 11 



* I \ \ \ 

♦ / \ » ' ! ' 






Fig. 17. 

in which the movement is coarse and more general, 
and in which less attention is given by the writer to 
questions of form. 

It remains for us to notice that there are certain 
forms of writing in which the individual has trained 
himself to make no use whatever of the fingers. It is 
not our purpose at this time to deal with such unusual 
and extreme forms of writing movement. Enough to 
say that they require long periods of special practise. 
When the ordinary individual is asked to write with- 
out moving the fingers, the records generally make it 
very clear that some finger movement has crept in, in 
spite of the effort to exclude it. 

The general conclusion from the comparison of a 
large number of records, of which the three reproduced 



THE TEACHER'S WRITING HABIT 177 

represent the chief types, may be summed up briefly 
in the statement: in ordinary writing the fine forma- 
tive movements are executed by the fingers; the move- 
ments which carry tlie fingers forward are executed 
by the hand or arm; and the pauses between groups 
of letters are utilized for longer forward arm move- 
ments which bring the hand back into an easy work- 
ing position. 

The different types of coordination are w^ell illus- 
trated in these three records. Let me repeat the state- 
ment that each individual has his own peculiar com- 
bination of arm and hand and finger movements so 
that while these three records represent types, they 
do not by any means represent all possible forms of 
coordination. The forms of coordination are as nu- 
merous and as various as are the individuals who 
write. 

Let us carry the experiment further so as to see 
what are some of the influences which effect even a 
well-established habit of movement. A subject was re- 
quired to make a record of a series of free upward and 



1 2 3 4- 5 6 r 



1 2 3 4 S e 7 



\ \ \ \ \ ' ! 




FiQ. 18. 

downward movements such as those represented on the 
left of Fig. 18. In this first experiment no restrictions 
whatever were placed upon the subject; he was allowed 
to make each line in the freest possible manner. The 
13 



1Y8 GENETIC PSYCHOLOGY FOR TEACHERS 



corresponding tracer-record is given on the right of the 
same figvire. The presence of some finger movements 
appears in the fact that there is a lack of sharply de- 
fined angles in the tracer-record. The tracer-record 
shows, however, by its general form and slope, that it 
is due very largely to free arm movements which car- 
ried the whole hand over the same path as that trav- 
ersed by the writing pen. 

The lines which the subject had prepared in this 
first free drawing were then set for imitation, and in 
order that the imitation might be exact, the extrem- 
ities of each of the upward and downward move- 
ments were indicated before the movement began by 
means of dots. A typical result of such restricted 
movement is presented in Fig. 19. It should be noted 



1 a 34 5 6 7 



12 34567 

\ \ s \ \ ' I 

« \ » « > . • 

\ \ '^ \ \ \ •> 

\ \ \ \ , ', I 




Fig. 19. 



also that the time required for such restricted move- 
ment was decidedly longer than that required for the 
first free movement represented in Fig. 18. The char- 
acteristic difference between these two movements is, 
of course, obvious when the two tracer-records are com- 
pared. The first or free movement is predominantly an 
arm movement, the second contains a very much larger 
element of finger movement, especially in the down- 
ward strokes. The subject finds that in order to meet 
the points prescribed, it is necessary to make a finer. 



THE TEACHER'S WRITING HABIT 179 

more accurate adjustment than was necessary in the 
first drawing. 

A fact which appears very clearly in Fig. 18 may 
also be made a subject of special comment. The move- 
ment is not the same in character at the outset as it 
is later in the course of the drawing. This same fact 
appears in almost every record of writing. The hand 
is evidently not in position at first, but requires a few 
strokes to adjust itself. Sometimes the necessary ad- 
justment is brought about by a greater emphasis on 
finger movement, sometimes by a more pronounced 
hand movement. 

Another group of results is as follows : Any change 
in the conditions under Avhich the subject writes will 
modify the character of coordination. A change from 
a hard pencil to a soft pencil, or a change from a ver- 
tical position of the paper to an oblique position, will 
be sufficient to produce noticeable variations in the 
character of the muscular coordination, even when the 
product of the movement — that is, the written letters — 
conform very closely to the same type. 

There is one movement which enters into the total 
complex of writing movements which requires special 
attention. It is not recorded by our tracer and conse- 
quently must be studied by itself. It is a movement 
which the physiologists describe by the name prona- 
tion. It consists in rotating the hand, so that it 
tends to lie flat on its palm. This rotary movement 
is possible, as you know, because the lower arm is sup- 
plied with two bones — the ulna and radius — which 
fasten at the wrist in such a way that they can turn 
the hand so that the palm lies either upward or down- 



ISO GENETIC PSYCHOLOGY FOR TEACHERS 



ward. When the palm is downward, or prone, the 
position is due to the movement which we mentioned, 

the movement of 
pronation. Most 
adults make a slight 
movement of prona- 
tion in the course of 
writing a line across 
the page. The mo- 
tive and effect of 
this movement can 
be easily understood. 
Let us first note 
that the position of 
the hand and fingers 
at the beginning of 
the line of writing 
is such that the 
movement of the 
first finger (which, 
as we have seen, is 
the most important 
movement in direct- 
ing the pen in its 
downward strokes) 
will give the letters 
a certain slope with reference to the edges of the 
paper. This first slope may be to the right, or it 
may be vertical, or it may be to the left; but in 
any case it is the result of a pen movement which 
depends for its direction upon the total position of 
the hand, arm, and fingers, with respect to the edges 




Fig. 20. 



THE TEACHER'S WRITING HABIT 181 

of the paper. As the hand moves across the paper 
during the writing of the line, it is obvious that the 
position of the arm and hand with respect to tlie paper 
must undergo a change by virtue of the movement 
of the arm about its center in the elbow. To make 
this statement definite we may study the angles with 
the aid of Fig. 20, and we shall find that the angles 
formed by the axis of the arm and the left edge of the 
paper are, at the beginning of the line, acute below 
the point of intersection and obtuse above; while the 
angles formed by the axis of the arm and the edge 
of the paper, at the end of the line of writing, either 
are, or tend to be. Just the reverse. If as sometimes 
happens the center of arm movement — that is, the 
elbow — is itself moved forward during the writing of 
the line, the above statement in regard to angles holds 
with this change: each period between movements of 
the elbow is to be treated as if it were a separate line. 

The gradual modification in the position of the arm 
axis with reference to the edge of the paper, which 
takes place during the writing of a line, requires some 
definite form of compensating movement, if the slope 
of the letters is to be kept uniform with reference to 
the edges of the paper. 

It should be noted at this point that a compensating 
movement of less degree is required to counteract the 
changes in the direction of the axis of the hand which 
are due to the wrist movements that take place as we 
have seen in writing a word (see Fig. 15, p. 172). This 
lesser corrective movement is of the same type as the 
greater movement which is the main subject of dis- 
,cussion; it therefore needs no special discussion. An- 



182 GENETIC PSYCHOLOGY FOR TEACHERS 

other preliminary remark is that if one examines many 
specimens of handwriting, he will see that only partial 
corrections of the slope of finger movements have usu- 
ally been effected by ordinary writers. The slopes of 
letters at the end of a line, and the slopes of letters at 
the end of a word, are commonly greater than the 
slopes at the beginning. This failure to correct the 
slope, gives to the line and to the word, the somewhat 
irregular appearance usually noticeable in ordinary 
Avriting. 

Coming back to our main discussion, we may say 
that, so far as any correction in slope is effected, this 
correction results from a movement of pronation 
which tends to throw the upper end of the pen toward 
the writer and thus to give the pen a movement more 
nearly parallel to its first movements at the beginning 
of the line. This movement of pronation is one which 
most adults have, but have in only partially developed 
degree. It is a kind of added refinement which gives 
uniformity to the slope without interfering with the 
continuous arm movement across the page. If the 
movement of pronation is present only in small degree, 
another way of securing uniformity of slope is to keep 
moving the elbow forward every time the slope of the 
letters begins to grow noticeably different. This re- 
peated change of position of the elbows is, however, 
neither easy nor conducive to fluency of writing. 

The corrective movement of pronation which we 
have been discussing, is required no matter what the 
slope of the letters. It is not a factor which will help 
to settle any of the disputed questions in regard to the 
slope of writing, it is rather a factor of movement 



THE TEACHER'S WRITING HABIT 183 

necessary to secure uniformity, whatever the slope. It 
is one of the nicest refinements of the whole complex 
coordination, and when fully developed it can be ob- 
served as a regular and very gradual adjustment as the 
hand travels across the page. 

This movement of pronation furnishes a favorable 
subject for investigation, just because of its incomplete 
development in most adults. A group of ten teachers 
was once induced by the present writer to give some 
attention to the regularity of the slope of their letters. 
The members of this group were asked to pay attention 
as closely as possible to the conscious processes which 
accompanied their efforts to improve, and they were 
also asked to make daily records of their observations 
and to note whether or not they really improved in 
the regularity of slope during the period of practise. 
These ten teachers were all trained in careful observa- 
tion and could consequently be depended upon to take 
up the practise with intelligent interest. On the other 
hand, they had no special preparation for the particu- 
lar form of practise which was prescribed. ISTo one 
directed their attention during the first period of the 
experiment to the movement of pronation, and they 
were asked to put themselves as far as possible in the 
normal attitude of one who is trying as earnestly as pos- 
sible to improve his writing, rather than in the studied 
attitude of one who is investigating the problem merely 
as an outsider. 

The first result of the practise was that each of the 
persons became clearly conscious of the fact that his 
own writing contained many irregular slopes. Atten- 
tion to this matter grew so keen that it extended to 



184 GENETIC PSYCHOLOGY FOR TEACHERS 

the writing produced by others, and all the observers 
expressed surprise at the degree of irregularity that 
had, up to this time, escaped notice. There was a very 
general agreement that the recognition of this irregu- 
larity of slope was a definite experience resulting from 
an unusual and clearly conscious comparison of the 
forms of all letters looked at by the experimenters. 

As soon as the irregularities were recognized, and 
the effort to correct these irregularities commenced, 
there was a general agreement as to the difficulty of 
finding any guiding slope to follow in actual writing. 
The effort to refer back to earlier letters in a given 
line, the effort to refer to letters in the line above, the 
effort to carry in memory a sort of standard angle with 
the horizontal line — all these devices are mentioned as 
methods of securing uniformity. There is not a single 
case among the early records of the ten adults in which 
reference of any kind is made to any form of move- 
ment. All the devices mentioned emphasize the visual 
guides as the ones consciously employed. Several noted 
the tendency to write more slowly and carefully, and 
one noted later that it cramped his hand to write regu- 
larly. All found it possible to improve the slope of the 
letters by constant attention. Several noted that there 
were days when the letters were very much less regular 
than on other days. Many times the days of irregular 
movements were described in terms which indicated 
that the physical condition of the writer was not good, 
but not infrequently the records merely remarked that 
there was no apparent reason. 

Nothing could be more obvious from the records 
than the fact that the whole practise of these persons 



THE TEACHER'S WRITING HABIT 185 

consisted in what we have called a non-rational effort 
to approach an end which was always presented to 
consciousness in terms of visual perception, and never 
presented in terms of the movements which were the 
real means by which the end must be reached. The 
movements were hardly more intelligently or directly 
guided than are those of a child. The whole attention 
was concentrated on the product. 

After practise had been going on for four weeks 
with some evidences of improvement, but no definite 
notion on the part of the practisers as to how they might 
accelerate the improvement, they were all asked to 
write under observation a single word at the beginning 
of the line and then to pass over the middle of the 
paper to the extreme end of the line and there to write 
the same word again. The word " long " was used for 
this test, this being a suitable word to emphasize the 
slope both above and below the line. 

Three distinct types of results showed themselves 
in this experiment. First, there were two cases in 
which the elbow and whole arm were carried across 
the page in such a way that the arm was, at the end of 
the line, in a position parallel to its first position. 
For these two subjects, the conscious control of the 
slope consisted, as throughout the practise, in a simple 
visual recognition of the slope of the letters produced. 
They could not even describe their movement when 
asked to do so. Secondly, there were three distinct 
cases in which the hand was adjusted by a movement 
of pronation, such as that described. But even in 
these cases the movement was present in such a com- 
pletely automatic form that it attracted no attention 



186 GENETIC PSYCHOLOGY FOR TEACHERS 

to itself. Finally;, the remaining five members of the 
group fall into a class intermediate to the first two 
classes mentioned. For these five experimenters, the 
movement was not purely automatic nor could it be 
described as wholly developed. When these writers 
reached the end of the line they found the hand in 
such a position that it was impossible to make a slope 
that satisfied their visual expectation without executing 
some kind of additional movement. The movements 
employed were of various kinds, but usually contained 
an element of pronation. The pronounced demand for 
a change in the position of the hand called attention to 
the hand itself. It is to be noted at once, however, that 
no one of the subjects paid attention to the hand any 
further than to try to get the fingers into an easy posi- 
tion. There was no disposition to make the hand the 
chief factor in attention. So long as the hand could 
not be used readily in producing the slope desired, there 
was a recognized demand that it be moved. The move- 
ment was of a tentative and non-rational kind, now in 
this direction, now in that. There was no distinct and 
clear recognition of the position aimed at, nor of the 
superiority of one kind of movement over any other. 
There was merely an effort to reach a certain end of 
production, and in order to reach this end, the hand 
had to be in an easy position, and it was moved until 
brought into this easy position. That attention to the 
hand was not of clearly recognized importance in de- 
veloping the right form of action, appears in the fact 
that there was no uniformity in action even after some 
of the subjects had by chance hit upon the easy move- 
ment of pronation. They continued, time after time. 



THE TEACHER'S WRITING HABIT 187 

to find it necessary to make tentative efforts in this 
direction and in that, until finally the proper move- 
ment was hit npon by what seemed in each case to be 
pure chance. No one of the subjects ever discovered 
the movement itself in any such way as to call attention 
to it as a fact of movement. In other words, the posi- 
tion of the hand was never clearly recognized in terms 
of its own movements. Consciousness on the part of 
these writers was always visual consciousness. Move- 
ments were not subjects of direct attention, and they 
were never held in consciousness in the form of mem- 
ories of clearty recognized movements. 

Here, then, is a splendid example of how, through 
one's own training, one may learn what are the diffi- 
culties in the educational process. Writing, which is 
essentially a coordinated movement, has to be developed 
through trial after trial, with consciousness directed, 
not upon the movement itself, but on the visual images 
which appear as results of the movement. What one 
is training is the movement; what one is thinking of 
is not movement at all, but visual images. When the 
movement becomes well enough trained so that one 
need not have any anxiety about its operating well, 
then attention is withdrawn in great measure from even 
the visual forms. Attention thus becomes free in the 
last stages of development to reach out into wider 
fields — ^that is, to leave even visual experience — and de- 
vote itself to the meanings of words and sentences. 

The final result of the complete development of the 
writing habit is that the movement thus becomes wholly 
automatic. This automatic character of adult writing 
is one of its most interesting and significant charac- 



188 GENETIC PSYCHOLOGY FOR TEACHERS 

teristics. Because the habit is so thoroughly automatic, 
we do not recognize it in ordinary experience as a 
subject worthy of study. We come to think of it as 
we do of a hundred other automatic habits — as a 
natural endowment. Of course it is not a natural 
endowment. More than most of our highly developed 
habits, more than walking or talking, for example, 
writing has become automatic through individual 
practise. 

Walking especially is a form of muscular coordina- 
tion for which the nervous organization was largely 
provided in the brain of the infant when the infant was 
born. To be sure, it took some time after birth for 
the walking center to mature, but it was all provided 
for, and needed only to grow to its full maturity. But 
writing was provided for in the infant brain only in 
the general sense in which there are unorganized cen- 
ters ready for development through individual prac- 
tise. That this unorganized writing center becomes a 
fully developed center of muscular coordination, that 
we have in adult life a completely automatic habit of 
action in which attention is freed even from visual con- 
trol of the movements, is an indication of how much 
individual practise can do to develop movement even 
when practise operates, as we know it does in this case, 
Avithout attention to the movement itself. 

It remains for us to become somewhat more fully 
acquainted with the meaning of the .statement that 
writing is automatic. Let us begin with a description 
of the facts of experience. We sit down and think out 
the thought, and then the rest of the process goes on 
very easily, occupying a little time, to be sure, and 



THE TEACHER'S WRITING HABIT 189 

requiring some little directing attention, but making 
no heavy drain upon consciousness. So slight, indeed, 
is the attention devoted to the writing process after the 
thought has been clearl}' worked out, that one finds 
himself making all sorts of curious slips. One finds 
himself writing the for they, as though the word hav- 
ing been once thought out, consciousness hurried on to 
the next word and did not notice in its haste that suffi- 
cient time was not allowed for the execution of the 
first order. Or the fact that consciousness is far beyond 
the laggard movement of writing appears in the mis- 
taken ending which is added to a given word and is 
obviously borrowed from some word farther on in the 
sentence. I find illustrations of this in my own 
manuscript where I have written " in favoring " in the 
phrase " in favor of their learning," or where I have 
written " broal " in the phrase " broad and liberal." 
Again, one sees how little consciousness watches over 
the developed writing movement when some wholly un- 
desired word is written instead of the one thought. 
Thus, one writes "is" for "if," "from" for "for," 
and less frequently makes such substitutions as the fol- 
lowing, borrowed from a letter now on my desk, 
" shall " for " sound." Here the first letter of the 
word being well under way, the attention of the writer 
evidently left the movement to finish itself automatic- 
ally. The writing habit is so thoroughly organized 
that for the most part it can be relied upon to do 
what is appropriate. These mistakes which show how 
far the movement may go wrong, give us a notion of 
how thoroughly we rely, in all cases, upon the organ- 
ized movement to go on without watching. 



190 GENETIC PSYCHOLOGY FOR TEACHERS 

Another way of realizing how thoroughly automatic 
the writing movement has become in adult life, is to 
contrast the eas}^ flow of thought that one enjoys when 
all is well with the writing — as, for example, when one 
is using a good pen — with the utter impossibility of 
doing anything in the way of thinking when one is sup- 
plied with a poor pen or bad paper. The poor pen 
keeps consciousness so busy with the mere making of 
marks that there is no surplus attention to reach out 
into the realms of thought. Noble sentiments with 
a bad pen are at least difficult, one is probably justified 
in saying they are utterly impossible. 

The statement that the writing movement requires 
very little attention to itself is an important descrip- 
tion of the developed adult mode of writing. But to 
tell where attention is not concentrated, is a negative 
statement, and is never complete without its positive 
supplement. The positive supplementary statement has 
already been more than hinted at in our discussion, 
but is of sufficient importance to deserve special con- 
sideration. The attention freed from concentration 
upon any phase of tlie mere act of production, is turned 
to the thought to be expressed. Writing would not be 
a means of expression unless it were automatic enough 
to leave the mind free to arrange its ideas for expres- 
sion. In adult life we are usually thinking about 
what we are expressing. In other words, the developed 
attention is turned away from the process of produc- 
tion, and in very large measure even from the product 
as it appears in the written lines, and is concentrated 
upon what is being expressed. 

There are some cases, to be sure, in which writing 



THE TEACHER'S WRITING HABIT 191 

is not thus used solely as a means of expression. Then 
we notice at once a marked change in the character 
of our experience and in the direction of attention. 
For example, when one writes copy on the blackboard, 
he is sure to do something besides express ideas. He 
tries to make unusually regular lines and perfectly 
symmetrical letters. The thought which the word ex- 
presses is not uppermost in the mind. It is well to con- 
sider carefully the fact that such copy writing is not 
writing for expression, but is rather writing for beauty 
and regularity of form. Attention is brought back 
in such cases to the process of production, and the 
writing activity is not automatic. 

Sometimes one withdraws attention from the proc- 
ess of production at a stage of development at which it 
is at least doubtful whether one ought to trust the 
process of movement to take care of itself. We have 
already indicated some such cases in our earlier discus- 
sions. Thus, the process of writing is usually not 
sufficiently developed in adult life to ensure regularity 
in the slope of writing. Most of us do not care to 
bother, however, with the labor of improving in this 
particular, and so it comes that long before the refined 
movement of pronation which we have described, is 
anything like completely developed, we withdraw atten- 
tion from the process of getting uniform slopes and 
turn to the ideas which we are expressing. The first 
step, if one would improve the slope of his letters, is 
to go back to the stage of development in which atten- 
tion is turned to the process of production. As we 
saw in the cases described, the first step toward im- 
provement in slope is to attend to slope. 



192 GENETIC PSYCHOLOGY FOR TEACHERS 

This study of adult writing marks out for us the 
problems which must be taken up when one attempts 
to investigate the development of writing in immature 
writers. There are two entirely distinct problems of 
development. One problem is to discover the character 
and degree of the muscular coordination involved at 
different stages of development, and the other prob- 
lem is to discover the direction and object of atten- 
tion. The one problem consists in the analysis of the 
movement into its factors, and in the intelligent under- 
standing of the way in which these movement factors 
cooperate in the unitary and yet complex form of 
action under discussion. The other problem is the 
problem of the conscious states parallel to the physical 
movements. 

And now our examination of the teacher's process 
of writing is complete, at least as far as we can carry it 
here. We find writing to be an automatic form of pro- 
duction in which all one's past development is expressed 
in one's own individual mode of coordination. Let us 
ask some of the questions that are so often asked in the 
discussion of writing. First, what is the most approved 
form of movement? Second, how shall one hold the 
pen, keeping in mind the fact that its angle to the 
paper must be changed as the hand moves across the 
paper? Third, how shall one hold the hand? Fourth, 
how shall one place the paper? Fifth, shall one make 
the letters round or long; and at what slope shall the 
letters stand? Sixth, what is the normal speed of wri- 
ting? Seventh, what is the normal age at which auto- 
matic writing is attained? Do you not see that these 
questions can not be answered without very large con- 



THE TEACHER'S WRITING HABIT 193 

sideration of the individual? You are not dealing, 
let me repeat it, merely Avith pens and paper when we 
take up these questions. You are not dealing primarily 
with forms and letters ; you are dealing with some indi- 
vidual's muscular coordinations and with some indi- 
vidual's conscious processes of attention. I should 
rather see the writing teachers of this country intelli- 
gently interested in the development of this or that 
child; I should rather see them engaged in the careful 
study of the particular form of coordination that has 
been attained at any given stage of development; I 
should rather see them interested in the necessity of 
turning the attention of the individual child in this 
direction or in that — than to see them interested, as 
they now too often are, in all the systems of writing 
that can be invented. How often those who have given 
any attention to the writing taught in the schools have 
seen the same system successful in one class room and 
utterly unsuccessful in the next room. Why is this? 
The explanation is to be found in the difference be- 
tween the teachers. Some teachers recognize even now 
that the child is the important center of interest during 
the writing lesson. Such teachers aA on the right 
road. Let us follow their lead, striving only to ex- 
tend our knowledge of the writing process beyond what 
is known at the present time. 

The question is seriously asked again and again in 
these times : " Shall teachers be investigators ? " And 
the wail of the overworked teacher is heard answering 
this question in the negative. I think that we have 
too often been misunderstanding what investigation 
means. We have been led to think that it means in- 
13 



194 GENETIC PSYCHOLOGY FOR TEACHERS 

quiring into matters outside of our practical work — 
that it means leaving untouched the matters that lie at 
our very hands. Of course you will be overburdened 
if you investigate some remote corner of the globe and 
then clumsily blunder with the processes of every-day 
school life. Will you not see that you should revise 
your notions of what investigation is? Will you not 
take up some investigation which fits your work ? Make 
your investigation relevant, and then it will not over- 
burden you. On the contrary, it will lighten your 
task. 

What investigations are relevant, do you ask? I 
think there can be no difficulty in answering that. 
Study to understand the common forms of bodily and 
mental activity with which the school deals. Study 
yourselves and study the children. It will profit you 
more to know all about what you do when you write, 
and all about what your children are doing when they 
learn to write, than it will to know about some of the 
remoter phases of mental or physical life. The truth 
is that we are not quick to see the value of studying 
commonplace facts. We want something striking. We 
study children's preferences for colors, and children's 
secret languages, and what not, and we find their every- 
day commonplace activities with which we have to deal 
in our routine lives entirely escaping us. Or we try 
to answer some profound question about the nature of 
attention or memor}^, or about the forms of reasoning 
or the categories of thought. Give up all that for the 
time being. There are problems without number to be 
solved here at our very hands. They are the direct 
problems, the productive problems that we need to 



THE TEACHER'S WRITING HABIT 195 

solve for the sake of our own activities. Let us try to 
solve them first, and then I am disposed to think that 
most of the others will disappear. 

As we bring this chapter to a close, let us review 
briefly the ground we have covered. Writing is a com- 
plex movement. Its complexity is of the harmonious 
type which results from thoroughgoing cooperation of 
the various muscles. This cooperation is brought about 
through the development of a coordinating center in 
the nervous system. Individual coordinations exhibit 
certain typical differences which show that the whole 
problem of writing is one of individual coordination. 
The mental processes which parallel the development 
of muscular coordination may be described by pointing 
out that when coordination is complete the attention is 
freed from the producing process and may be devoted 
to the thoughts expressed. The direction in which 
attention is turned before writing becomes automatic 
is clearly indicated by observations which any one can 
easily make if he will try to develop some relatively 
undeveloped phase of his own writing — as, for exam- 
ple, the regularity of the slope of his letters. Such 
an effort to develop regularity of slope will show 
that attention in non-automatic writing is centered 
chiefly on the visual results, and on certain visual 
copies. 

The acquaintance we have cultivated with the wri- 
ting process as it is exhibited in ourselves will make it 
possible in our next chapter to take up a number of 
questions in regard to the development of the writing 
habit in others, especially in children. These studies 
of the development of the habit in others belong to our 



196 GENETIC PSYCHOLOGY FOR TEACHERS 

teacher-study as legitimate lines of supplementary in- 
vestigation^ and they will serve also to illustrate the 
unity in spirit which exists between our point of view 
of self-examination and the point of view of the true 
child-study, which is the study of growing faculties. 



CHAPTER VII 

RACIAL AND INDIVIDUAL DEVELOPMENT IN WRITING 

A GOOD deal has been said and written about the 
parallelism between the development of the race and the 
development of the individual. Indeed, it has some- 
times been argued that because there is such a parallel- 
ism, we may safely follow the history of the race in 
arranging the conditions with which to surround the 
developing child. This direct application of racial con- 
ditions to individual life is, however, out of harmony 
with the fundamental idea of adaptation as we have 
already studied it in our discussion of the meaning of 
development. The modern child has before him the 
problem of fitting himself to the modern, and future 
environment. He will never be placed in the same en- 
vironment as was his savage ancestors, and it is a 
great mistake to drag him back to that primitive en- 
vironment in the hope of adapting him in that way 
to the highly complex and highly developed conditions 
of life which really confront him. 

I have made this prefatory statement in the hope 
of preparing your minds in a negative, as well as in a 
positive way for the discussion which we have now to 
take up, for we shall begin our discussion of the way 
in which the writing habit develops, with an outline of 

197 



198 GENETIC PSYCHOLOGY FOR TEACHERS 

the way in which the race has developed the ability to 
write. Then we shall trace the parallelism between this 
general racial development and individual development. 
And I warn you again that the parallelism is not 
directly productive in the sense of giving us methods 
or devices that can be taken up in immediate pedagog- 
ical practise. For example, as we go back to the days 
when men wrote with pictures only, do not begin to 
think that the child of to-day would profit by a similar 
ordeal of picture-writing before he attains to symbol- 
writing. That is not the value of the parallel. The 
real value of the parallel lies in the fact that in the 
history of the race's struggle we have a long and com- 
plete record of how the human mind and the human 
hand have, under comparatively simple conditions, 
grown more and more skilful in this particular art. 
Having learned in this way something of the princi- 
ples which underlie this art, something of its aims and 
purposes as revealed in its development under simple 
and diverse conditions, Ave can better attack the much 
more complex problem of the modern child learning to 
write under more complex and stable conditions. The 
development of this individual child will certainly not 
be the same as that of the race, for the child does not 
have to develop a system of writing. He has merely 
to learn what the race has prepared for him to use. 

By way of positive statement, we may say that where 
the child differs from the race we shall look for differ- 
ences in the conditions surrounding the two processes 
of development. Where, on the contrary, the motives 
and tendencies of development are dependent on char- 
acteristics of the mind or hand rather than upon vari- 



DEVELOPMENT IN WRITING 199 

able external conditions, we shall gain from our study 
of racial development certain positive suggestions about 
the character of the child's development, in spite of the 
different ways in which these motives and tendencies 
actually manifest themselves in the two cases. Our 
study of the parallel can thus be made productive with- 
out our being misled into any effort to find direct ap- 
plicability of racial history to the work of the school, 
or without our losing sight for a moment of the funda- 
mental differences as well as the fundamental likenesses 
between racial and individual development. 

The most primitive writing was of the kind which 
all of you have seen represented in our histories, where 
they describe the savage condition and early writing 
of the American Indians. A specimen of such writing 
is given in Fig. 21. Such writing always consists in 
a few rough pictures. There was evidently little ability 
to make fine, regular lines. The writer's muscles were 
not trained for delicate work. There was not even a 
clear and fully matured recognition of the form of the 
objects presented. No details were present, and the 
whole picture was a sort of rough approximation to the 
original. But rough and crude as these drawings were, 
they appealed to the savage's memory and imagination 
enough to communicate to him certain ideas. What 
could be more natural than that these lines and figures 
intended for the eyes, should reproduce, that aspect of 
objects which appealed to the eyes, namely, the form? 
This primitive writing was, all through, a matter of 
visual interest and visual recognition. Its purpose was 
to communicate ideas as clearly and as accurately as 
possible by an appeal to the eye. 



200 GENETIC PSYCHOLOGY FOR TEACHERS 

Starting from this primitive picture-writing, human 
development runs out in two different directions. In 
the first place, men began to take more and more inter- 
est in the reproduction of form. The details of the 
b 

a e f 
h 



^^ 



I 



c 9 



d 



cX 



Fig. 21. 

An Ojibwa love-letter, recorded and explained by Garrick Mallery 
in the Annual Report of the Bureau of Ethnology, 1888-89, 
p. 363. The writer, a girl of the Bear totem (b), summons 
her lover, who belongs to the Mud Puppy totem {d), along the 
various trails indicated, to the lodge (c) from which the beck- 
oning hand protrudes. The enclosed figures at I, j, and k are 
lakes. The crosses indicate that the girl and her companions 
are Christians. "The clear indications of locality," writes 
Mallery, " serve as well as if in a city a young woman had 
sent an invitation to her young man to call at a certain street 
and number." 

original objects began to receive more attention and to 
be more accurately and fully incorporated into the 
reproductions. This refinement of form very soon be- 
gan to go beyond the limits necessary for the commu- 
nication of ideas, and an art developed whose chief 
interest is the higher and higher treatment of form. 
This art which deals with form appeared at first as 
drawing, later as sculpture and painting. In these 



DEVELOPMENT IN WRITING 201 

various branches of what we call art in the narrower 
sense of the term, the direct appeal to the eye is con- 
tinued and brought to its highest perfection. 

The second line of development, which begins with 
primitive picture-writing, is the one in which we are 
interested in our present discussion. It is the line of 
development of writing proper. Here we must recog- 
nize a greater devotion than in art to the desire to com- 
municate ideas. The form of the figures used in wri- 
ting is of interest only in so far as form stands for some 
kind of meaning. The result of this chief interest in 
meaning rather than form is that the forms are reduced 
to their simplest terms. There is, indeed, a point be- 
yond which the form- can not be simplified without 
danger that it lose its power of communicating a distinct 
idea. Thus, if the savage wishes to make a distinction 
between horses and cattle, he must keep enough of the 
distinctive details to insure the communication of the 
right idea. He accomplishes his end in this particular 
case by retaining the horns as the distinctive mark of 
his drawing for cattle. But while form can not be lost 
sight of entirely, it is so unimportant that purely external 
causes may contribute to the corruption and simplifica- 
tion of the forms of the drawings. Thus, one such out- 
side consideration is to be found in the fact that straight 
lines are easier to draw than curved lines in the kinds 
of materials frequently used for early written rec- 
ords. The result is that not only were forms much 
simplified in the early stages of writing, but they were 
simplified in Egypt and Greece and in many other 
primitive civilizations, so as to be more easily engraved 
on stone and metal or other inflexible materials. 



202 GENETIC PSYCHOLOGY FOR TEACHERS 

Some excellent illustrations of corruptions in form 
are given to us by students of Chinese writing. Chinese 
writing, as you may know, is not like our own, made up 
of a few elements. It has a separate symbol for each 
word. The word for sun, for example, is a single sym- 
bol rather than a series of three letters as in our writing. 
The modern Chinese symbol for sun looks like a ladder 
with three rounds. At first sight this does not seem 
to have any relation so far as its form is concerned to 
the object for which it stands. But compare this mod- 
ern symbol with another symbol of more ancient origin 
and the meaning is clear and the modification in form 
is immediately recognized as due to the general prin- 
ciple that straight lines are easier to draw with the 
brush-pen of the Chinese than are curved lines. The 
ancient form for the sun is a picture, consisting 
of a circle with a dot in the center. The dot of 
the ancient symbol is the middle round of the mod- 
ern ladder-shaped symbol. The sides, and the top and 
bottom rounds of the modern figure, are the final 
rectilinear remains of the circumference of the ancient 
circle. 

Fig. 22 reproduces a number of ancient and modern 
Chinese forms which bear out the same conclusions as 
those reached in the case of the first symbol for the 
sun. 

Form-writing tlius developed gradually into what 
might be called convenient or simplified form-writing. 
The convenient writing would not have been possible 
unless there had been the accompanying mental de- 
velopment away from the form to the meaning. This 
latter fact of greater and greater emphasis on mean- 



DEVELOPMENT IN WRITINQ 203 

ing rather than form, makes the characters used in the 
writing symbolic in their use, and so we refer to such 
writing as symbolic writing. Finally, we must not lose 
sight of the fact that even in this symbolic stage, the 

N :3 n Tjc :^ 

Fig. 22. 
The tipper line shows ancient forms of Chinese writing, the lower 
. line shows the derived modern forms. The characters signify, 
reading from left to right: sun, moon, mountain, tree (or 
wood), dog. 

imagination of the reader or writer is aroused directly 
through the eye. The visual symbol means a visual ob- 
ject, so that these written records constitute a series of 
purely visual experiences. 

The symbolic attitude, or the attitude in which 
meanings are more attended to than forms, makes pos- 
sible a wide range for development. Symbols freed 
from any direct references to objects of like form, came 
very soon to have two or three meanings, some very 
remote from the original signification. Thus, in Egypt 
the figure of the owl came to mean, not only the bird 
itself, but also, as with us, night, and still more in- 
directly, wisdom. Among our American Indians, the 
animal which the Indian chief painted on his totem 
pole came to stand for the man, and sometimes for the 
whole tribe. Symbolism of a highly developed type 
thus became common. 



204 GENETIC PSYCHOLOGY FOR TEACHERS 

At this point there set in another line of develop- 
ment which was slowly worked out in Egypt and 
Phenicia, and which has had the greatest possible in- 
fluence on the development of our present form of wri- 
ting. As soon as form symbolism had reached a high 
development, it naturally came into contact with an- 
other symbolical mode of representing objects which 
the race had developed. This other mode of represent- 
ing objects by something quite different from the ob- 
jects themselves, is what we call speech. It needs no 
long discussion to bring to your minds a clear recogni- 
tion of the fact that speech is a kind of symbolism. A 
given sound arouses in the imagination an idea which 
is quite remote from the sound itself. To make this 
step in the development of writing somewhat clearer, 
let us put it thus. Here is a given object. When the 
primitive man looked at that object he received a direct 
impression. If, now, after having received a direct im- 
pression, he wished to arouse in a companion a recollec- 
tion of such a direct experience, he could do it in one of 
two ways, either by making a symbolic mark or by 
making a symbolic sound. The symbolic mark and 
the symbolic sound had at first no connection except as 
they both referred to the same object. But very soon 
the sound symbolism began to assert its superiority. 
The sound name of an object was so fully developed 
and so thoroughly familiar that it took precedence as 
the means of expressing thought. Men did not even 
stop to recall in full the direct impression made by the 
sight of the object. They began to do as we do, to 
think in words, and to let the objective appearances drop 
into the background. And just as soon as this hap- 



DEVELOPMENT IN WRITING 205 

pened, the written symbol was forced into relations with 
the sound symbol. 

The first steps of this growing relation between 
sound and written symbols were of a type with which we 
are all quite familiar. You all know the kind of puzzle 
called a rebus, in which the first personal pronoun I, for 
example, is represented by a picture of the organ of 
sight, which has a name similar in sound. The verb 
" can " may likewise be represented in a rebus by that 
convenient tin article of household furniture with 
which we are familiar. We are thus well on the way 
to a sentence. " I can see a house," for example, 
would be easily completed in the same general way so 
far as the verb " see " is concerned by a picture or sym- 
bol of the ocean; and then all we need for the house is a 
true written symbol of the house itself. 

Now this kind of rebus-writing actually appears in 
some of the old Egyptian records, to show us how sounds 
and written symbols began to be related. Thus, the 
Egyptians had a word, the name of one of their gods, 
which was pronounced Hesiri. They also had two dis- 
tinct words, lies and iri^ exactly like the two syllables 
of the name Hesiri, so far as the sounds were concerned, 
but in no way related in meaning to the name of this 
god. The two separate words, 7ies and iri^ mean, re- 
spectively, a seat and an eye. When they wanted to 
write the name of the god, they did not draw his picture, 
but they evidently thought of his name, and then, 
thinking of the sounds only, they made this double 
pun that he was a seat-eye god. After that the repre- 
sentation of the god was easy, for they drew first the 
seat and then the eye and let it go at that. Another 



206 GENETIC PSYCHOLOGY FOR TEACHERS 

illustration from Egypt is the use of a basket to mean 
lord. This usage is perfectly clear as soon as we know 
that the word for basket and the word for lord were 
both pronounced neh. 

Notice that the written symbol is, by this connec- 
tion with the sound, given a wider range of usefulness 
than ever before. The picture of a basket, for example, 
came to stand, not only for the basket itself, and for the 
act of carrying, and for the idea of plenty, but it came 
to stand also, through the association with sound, for 
the word lord. 

After this form of rebus-writing, the sound associa- 
tion went forward another step. Instead of using a 
symbol because of the total sound which it represented, 
the symbol began to stand for the first sound contained 
in its name. Thus, to invent an illustration using our 
own English words. Suppose one wanted to write the 
word monkey. This being a rather hard animal to 
draw, the writer would divide the word into two syl- 
lables, and would then look around for some object the 
first syllable of whose name was the same as the first 
syllable of monkey. Mon is the common syllable of the 
words money and monkey. Use the picture of a coin 
then to stand for the desired syllable mon, and our 
word monkey is half written. The last part of the word 
monkey can be easily represented in the simple rebus 
fashion by a key. 

This way of breaking up words so as to extract the 
first syllable is a very clumsy device, to be sure. We can 
hardly understand how the race had ingenuity enough 
or patience enough to do it. But if you will think a 
moment you will see that the work of breaking words 



DEVELOPMENT IN WRITING 207 

up into constituent sounds had to be done in some such 
gradual way as this. It is not an easy thing for the 
child of the present day to break up words with which 
he is familiar into their constituent sounds. Have you 
not heard a child saying over words which contain simi- 
lar sounds with obvious delight at the similarity he has 
discovered? The pleasure which children get from 
such combinations as ding-dong, see-saw, is evidently 
due to the like sounds at the beginning of these syllables, 
and the interesting contrast in the later sounds. With 
such illustrations in mind, it is easy to understand how 
the old Phenieians gradually, by this comparison be- 
tween initial syllables, discovered the fundamental 
sounds and produced a sound alphabet which was 
capable of expressing all the different possible phonetic 
variations in their language. 

The illustration which we invented of monkey and 
money is paralleled by real historical facts in abun- 
dance. Thus in the ancient Egyptian language the name 
of the owl began with the sound which we represent 
to-day by the letter M. The Egyptians came to use the 
owl as a symbol for this M sound. And as little as one 
would guess it from the form of our letter M, this letter 
is the direct historical descendant of the Egyptian 
symbol of the owl. Fig. 23 will make it clear to you 
how the line of descent is traced. This series of figures 
also shows again the fact to which we have already called 
attention, namely, the fact that as interest in the form 
of the symbol grows less and less intense, the form will 
decay and become more and more simple and con- 
venient. It will finally be reduced, as are all our let- 
ters, to comparatively simple groups of lines, not re- 



208 GENETIC PSYCHOLOGY FOR TEACHERS 

sembling even remotely the objects from which the 
figure was first derived. 

Sometimes the historical evidence for this deriva- 
tion of letters from the first sjdlable or sound of names, 
is preserved for us in the names of the letters them- 






AA M 



Fig. 23. 

The figure shows the derivation of the letter M from the Egyptian 
hieroglyphic owl. The four forms in the upper part of the 
figure are Egyptian forms. The first on the left is the usual 
hieroglyphic picture of the owl, or, as it was called in the 
Egyptian language, mulak. The three remaining upper 
forms are found in the writings of the Egyptian priests. The 
first form on the left of the lower series is an ancient Semitic 
form. Then follow in order an ancient Greek form, and two 
later Greek forms. (From I. Taylor's The Alphabet, pp. 9 
and 10.) 

selves. Our own English letters now have names which 
correspond to the sounds of the letters and these simpli- 
fied sound names are no longer indicative of the origin 
of the letters. For significant names we must go back 
to some of the more ancient alphabets where the letters 
retain their primitive names. Thus, in the Hebrew 



DEVELOPMENT IN WRITING 209 

alphabet the first letter is aleph, and means ox; the 
second letter is beth, and means house; the third letter 
(like our English g) is gimel, and means camel; the 
fourth is daleth, and means door, and so on. 

We have now traced the history of writing down to 
the point at which it begins to be a means of represent- 
ing sounds rather than direct visual experiences. We 
should recognize clearly that the primitive attitude of 
mind was one of attention to form. That the gradual 
emancipation of attention from form and its transfer to 
meaning was complicated with the secondary line of 
development which grew out of the necessity of sub- 
jugating written symbolism to the more fully de- 
veloped sound symbolism of speech. All this develop- 
ment was very ancient. The Greeks emerge from their 
early association with the Oriental world fully equipped 
with a sound alphabet, which was, doubtless, borrowed 
largely from the Phenicians. The Romans learned the 
same alphabet from their Italian ancestors and later 
modified it through their own use and through contact 
with the later Greek forms. 

The forms of our own letters are derived in very 
direct lines of descent from the Roman forms, so that 
we may confine our attention to the Roman alphabet 
and the later European alphabets derived from the 
Roman. 

The earliest Roman forms were used on monu- 
ments, and owe their form very largely to the hard 
materials on which they were traced. The letters were 
made up almost entirely of straight lines and sharp 
angles. They were all very nearly uniform in height, 
and were written without connections between the suc- 
14 



210 GENETIC PSYCHOLOGY FOR TEACHERS 

cessive letters and without breaks between words. 
Fig. 24 gives an illustration of this earliest type of 
vrriting, as used even in some of the later Eoman manu- 
scripts. One needs only to look at the letters to recog- 



ILEVOLAISlWyl 
HICVtlXDllEJM 
SV DXB n S PAT liV 
BLLGlCAyilMOL 

Fig. 24. 
Roman capitals from a manuscript of Vergil's Georgics. The 
letters here reproduced show the first parts of four successive 
lines and are to be deciphered as follows: 
lUe volat simul . . , 
Hie vel ad Elei m . . . 
Sudabit spatia . . . 
Belgica vel mol . . . 

(Copied from Arndt's Tafeln.) 

nize at once that in the modern world many of these 
same Eoman capitals are still doing service where 
straight, angular letters of great legibility are desirable 
and possible. 

The capitals represent what we may call the maxi- 



DEVELOPMENT IN WRITING 211 

mum of legibility. It would be difficult to improve 
upon these forms if mere legibility were the only con- 
sideration in the formation of letters. But there are 
other considerations than mere legibility. The capitals 
are very clumsy letters to write. One could not write 
very rapidly when he had to make those sharp angles 
and separate letters. 

The demand for a more rapid form of writing must 
have made itself felt very early. Indeed, we have evi- 







Fig. 25. 

Early Roman cursive from wax tablet written in the year 139 
A. D. It relates to the purchase of a slave girl. It is to be 
deciphered as follows : 

Maximus Batonis puellam nomine 
Passiam sive ea quo alio nomine est, an 

circiter plus minus empta sportellaria 
norum sex emit mancipioque accepit 
de Dasio Verzonis Pirusta ex Kaviereti 
* ducentis quinque. 

(Copied from Arndt's Tafeln.) 

dence from a few business records belonging to the 
beginning of the Christian era that even the early 
Eomans had a rapid running hand which was used for 
ordinary business records. In Fig. 25 you see a speci- 



212 GENETIC PSYCHOLOGY FOR TEACHERS 

men of this early Roman cursive, as it is called. This 
cursive differs from the capitals in a number of char- 
acteristics. The letters tend to run into each other. 
Indeed, in some cases in even the earliest cursive, there 
are connecting lines or ligatures between the letters. 
These ligatures are regular and pronounced character- 
istics of all the later forms of cursive. Their less fre- 
quent appearance in the early forms is due to the fact 
that this writing was done for the most part on very 
unpliable wax tablets, and was, consequently, by no 
means as free and easy as was the later writing which 
was done after better materials had been discovered in 
papyrus and vellum on Avhich one could write with pen 
and ink. Finally, it must be noted that this early cur- 
sive writing is by no means as regular or legible as is 
the writing made up of capitals. Something of the 
regularity of form and of the clear-cut legibility of 
letters is always sacrificed when rapidity of execu- 
tion becomes the chief consideration. Note also the 
tendency toward back-hand slope in the lines, a 
feature evidently due to the effort to gain greater 
speed. 

The contrast between capitals and cursive is the 
ever-recurring contrast between forms of legible wri- 
ting and forms of rapid writing. As one comes down 
through the later periods of the history of writing, 
he finds a succession of forms devised like the capitals 
for legibility and beauty, and on the other hand he finds 
other forms devised for rapid and easy writing. The 
tendency of the beautiful and very legible forms is to 
become more and more regular and difficult to make, 
and the tendency of the rapid forms is to become more 



DEVELOPMENT IN WRITING 213 

and more difficult to read. Human nature does not 
seem to have changed much in these respects. 

After the Roman capitals and the early cursive, 
there grew up a kind of compromise form which was 
more rapid and less angular than the capitals, and 
hence easier to write. It was used, however, only by the 
book-making scribes, for it was still too difficult for or- 
dinary use. This form is reproduced in Fig. 26 and 

qUOSCUCY^Co'i 

T)$esiTucv>ue 

Fig. 26. 
Uncials from a manuscript of Cicero's De Republica. The manu- 
script was probably written in the third century. The lines' 
are to be deciphered as follows : 

quoscumque cog 
nosse sapien 
tis est tumue 
ro prospicere 

(Copied from Arndt's Tafeln.) 

is the so-called uncial form. A typical letter in this 
form is the letter e, which is no longer angular as it was 
in the capitals, but is much more like our lower-case 
letter. The derivation of this round e from the square 
capital is sufficiently direct to be obvious. The motive 
for inventing this new form is also obvious. The 



214: GENETIC PSYCHOLOGY FOR TEACHERS 

round letter is much more economical in the number 
of movements which it requires. In the square capital, 
the upper and lower horizontal strokes and the one 
vertical stroke^ all had to be made separately. In the 
round letter, one uninterrupted curved movement was 
substituted for the three separate movements just men- 
tioned. The single curved movement is therefore to 
be looked upon as a concession to the demands of move- 
ment. But the concession to movement would never 
have been possible without a change from the earlier 
writing materials. Tbis change has been described by 
an eminent authority in the following sentence: " To 
the substitution of a soft surface for a hard one, of the 
pen for the graving tool, we undoubtedly owe the 
rounded forms of the uncial letters." ^ 

One may say that the process which shows itself 
in the development of this e is the typical process of 
compromise which has been going on since the Koman 
period even down to our own time. There is a con- 
stant and growing concession to the demand for easier 
movement on the one side, and a clear effort on the 
other side to preserve the legibility and beauty of the 
letter. The great variety of forms invented since that 
early date are nothing more nor less than the experi- 
ments of the race in legibility and beauty, and ease 
and fluency of writing. 

During these experim.ents almost every conceivable 
form has been tried. The widest extremes have been 
reached and fortunately abandoned. The cursive grew 
so illegible in the thirteenth century, we are told, that 

1 E. M. Thompson, Ency. Brit., 9th ed,, vol. xviii, p. 145. 



DEVELOPMENT IN WRITING 215 

Frederick II was obliged to prohibit its use. The tend- 
encies toward elaboration among the careful and artis- 
tic writers went to such extremes that we are told of 
months spent on a single letter. 

With the invention of printing there entered a 
factor which tended to put a stop to experimenting 
with forms. The makers of types began to select from 
among the various scripts used by the scribes of the 
time, and the alphabet began to settle into its final 
form. The German printers, for example, selected the 
forms we know as the Gothic letters. The world has 
decided that the German printers made a mistake, and 
most of the rest of us, and even some of the better 
German printers of to-day, are using the much simpler 
and more legible forms of the old Roman capitals and 
later uncials. 

The invention of printing also fixed out English 
script. We borrowed the style of letter that had been 
made permanent by an Italian printer. Before we 
turn to that matter, however, let us glance at one or 
two forms of medieval script which will show us what 
we escaped. Fig. 27 reproduces one of the most elab- 
orate and fantastic of the early scripts. It is without 
the virtues of beauty or legibility, and it was too elab- 
orate to survive in a busy world. On the other hand, 
the specimen of Anglo-Saxon writing shown in Fig. 
28 certainly is beautiful and legible; its cardinal, and 
fatal fault is its elaborate and unwieldy form. 

We are indeed fortunate in the form of script which 
was finally adopted in England. We are fortunate as 
compared, for example, with the Germans, who are 
even to this day struggling with an elaborate and angu- 



216 GENETIC PSYCHOLOGY FOR TEACHERS 

lar form of writing. And it is to Italy, as I said a mo- 
ment ago, that we owe our script. In the days of 
Queen Elizabeth the educated Englishman went to Italy 




IWwajto'^iTiclu 




Fig. 27. 
A specimen of Merovingian cursive from the year 688 a. d. The 
part here reproduced is the end of the first line of the manu- 
script. The four lines which appear below the letters and 
extend into the writing, are the upper loops of some of the 
letters of the line just below the one here reproduced. The 
letters are to be deciphered as follows: 

Ideoque vestra cognuscat industria quod nos 

(Copied from Arndt's Tafeln.) 

to gain the polish which comes from contact with an 
older civilization — much as we go to Europe — and from 
Italy he brought back a simple, beautiful, running 
script. This script was borrowed from the form of 
printed letters which we call italics. The very name 
italics shows you that the type was made in Italy. The 
story goes that one of the famous printers by the name 
of Manutius Aldus, who did his Avork early in the six- 
teenth century, copied the handwriting of the great 
scholar Petrarch, and that Pope Julius, in recognition 



DEVELOPMENT IN WRITING 217 

of the beauty of his new type, granted Aldus exclusive 
right to use the same. This type of Aldus became our 
italics, and undoubtedly was one of the most influen- 
tial factors in determining our modern form of script. 
The general form of our letters was thus fixed after 
long periods of development. The race had to experi- 
ment a great deal in order to settle certain questions. 
But it has settled some matters definitely for us who 
inherit the benefits of all this experimentation. No 
one can tell us in these days that the chief function of 
handwriting is to be as legible as possible. We have a 
model of regularity and legibility in our printed capi- 

d'-tt^W ^^^^^^t* ^t^t^^ 

Fig. 28. 
Angfo-Saxon forms from the eighth century. This is a manu- 
script of Beda's History. The lines are to be deciphered as 
follows : 

librum eximium, quem in exem 
plum Sedulii geminato opere, 
et versibus exametris et prosa 
conposuit. Scripsit et alia 

(Copied from Arndt's Tafeln.) 

tals, and we have preserved these forms in our printing 
just because they were very regular and very legible; 
but our fathers some hundreds of years ago gave up the 
employment of these capitals for the ordinary uses of 



218 GENETIC PSYCHOLOGY FOR TEACHERS 

every-day life and compromised with the legitimate de- 
mands for fluency and ease of execution. 

It would seem as though the forms of many cen- 
turies might be appealed to in settling certain other 
questions. For example, all cursives have a certain 
running slope which grows too great when one writes 
very rapidly and carelessly, and which tends to dis- 
appear when o:ie tries to write the most legible hand 
that can possibly be written. Perhaps it was an acci- 
dent that Petrarch wrote with something of a slant. 
Perhaps it is an accident that most fluent writing of the 
type which imitates italics has a slant. Perhaps it is 
not an accident. Certainly history ofEers us a plain 
lesson in the fact that rapid writing tends as a rule to 
slant; more elaborate writing, especially when it be- 
comes drawing, does not. 

For my own part, I am not sure that the clear tes- 
timony of history that human nature tends to become 
careless when too fast writing is attempted, is not 
sufficient justification for the demand that children 
spend some time at first in draiving letters. I am not 
sure that the final slant of letters should not be allowed 
to appear after the drawing stage has passed. I am not 
sure, in short, that the compromise between the two 
tendencies toward legibility and rapidity does not have 
to be worked out in each individual. 

I wish I might induce each one of you before I leave 
this brief historical sketch to interest yourselves in 
some study of these matters. There is a very good 
article under the title Paleography in the Encyclopedia 
Britannica which all of you could read, and any good 
library will have other material on the subject which 



DEVELOPMENT IN WRITING 219 

will show you how much we depend for our present 
forms of writing on the labor of past generations. It 
is history of this type that will make us a little slower 
than we sometimes are in introducing sweeping inno- 
vations into our schools. 

Of course, history can not solve all our doubts and 
difficulties. We must progress and improve, and prog- 
ress means a better fitting of historical inheritances 
to present needs. With an alphabet evolved through 
long centuries on the one hand, and with the modern 
child on the other hand, the teacher's task is clear. 
What the study of history does not settle definitely, the 
study of present-day human nature will tend to make 
more plain. If we are in doubt as to whether children 
should draw or write at first, let us study the modern 
facts as revealed in modern men and children, and let 
us try to answer our question from such studies. 

Our studies of adult habits of writing and of his- 
torical developments of letters have led us to a general 
point of view which we shall adopt in the rest of our 
study. An easy, fluent, well-coordinated movement, 
producing letters of a fair degree of legibility, is the 
end at which we aim. The movement must be highly 
developed enough in the end to be automatic, so that 
attention may be free to follow the thoughts expressed. 
And in looking toward this end, we must realize that 
the child has to pass through stages of immaturity at 
which the movement is not fluent, and attention is not 
free, at which the forms of letters must be studied, and 
at which the mind is absorbed in the process of writing 
rather than in comprehending meanings. 

Certainly one can easily approach the practical prob- 



220 GENETIC PSYCHOLOGY FOR TEACHERS 

lem of cultivating an easy, fluent movement in the 
child, from the negative side, by watching a child try- 
ing to write. If there is anything that can be defi- 
nitely said of the child's efforts, it is that they are not 
fluent and easy. The child's movements are jerky and 
discontinuous. They are cramped, and excessive in 
the amount of energy which they require. They are 
uncertain, and seem to surprise the child as much as 
they do the teacher. In short, there is obvious lack of 
control and organization. We have already suggested 
that the adult can acquaint himself with the accom- 
panying mental attitude which attends the child's 
efforts to write, by trying to perform the same task 
with his own untrained muscles. Under such condi- 
tions the adult's movements will also show lack of con- 
trol and lack of organization. 

All these excessive and unorganized movements of 
the child are the raw material, if we may use that term, 
out of which a fluent, easy movement must be devel- 
oped. The child's movements and those of the adult 
when he tries to use unpractised muscles, are called 
diffuse movements. You will have no difficulty with 
that word, I am sure, for nothing is more obvious 
than that the untrained movements are too much spread 
out. The right muscle does not contract at the right 
time, and the whole irregular mass of activities lacks 
organization in just the way indicated by the word 
diffuse. And diffusion of movements can be under- 
stood when we recall our earlier discussion of the dis- 
turbing effects of sudden loud s^ounds on the regularity 
and control of movement. The real seat of diffusion 
is not in the muscles, but in the nervous system. When 



DEVELOPMENT IN WRITING 221 

the muscles move diffusely this is sure evidence that 
the impulse in the nervous system has been spread out 
or diffused, rather than carried along definite fixed chan- 
nels. And finally, this diffusion of impulses in the 
child's brain not being due to any sudden strength of 
the impulse, as it was in the cases of disturbance 
through sudden sounds, is explained by the fact that 
in the child the brain mass is itself unorganized and 
diffuse. The regular lines of connection necessary , for 
coordination have not yet been laid down. An impulse 
is free to wander about and shoot out at this point or 
at the other, in a very irregular and uncoordinated fash- 
ion. The child's brain, therefore, needs organization 
to overcome this natural diffuse state ; and the irregular 
movements with which he starts are, as we have said, 
the raw materials for development to work over. 

I want to digress from our main discussion for a 
moment to call your attention to the fact that if it 
were not for this diffuse condition of the child's nerv- 
ous system, there would be no hope of cultivating any 
individual habits of action. Suppose that all the pos- 
sible lines of connection through the brain were in- 
herited by the new-born infant ready for action. Then 
every form of movement would be fully provided for, 
and the infant would simply go ahead in a prescribed 
way without any possibilities of bringing forth in his 
own experience original forms of action. This is very 
nearly a true description of the condition of such an 
animal as the chick. The young chick just out of the 
shell, has a brain which is inherited in an almost com- 
pletely organized condition. The young chick can, 
therefore, do whatever it is going to do in life fairly 



222 GENETIC PSYCHOLOGY FOR TEACHERS 

well from the very first; but it has no large possibili- 
ties of developing individual modes of action. Diffu- 
sion, as opposed to the chick's condition, means possi- 
bilities of organization. Absence of diffusion means 
completed development, and completed development 
always has a negative side. Where you have completed 
development you can not have possibilities of new and 
original individual habits. 

With this word of digression to remind you that 
the child's diffuse nervous condition and diffuse move- 
ments are the necessary raw material for the develop- 
ment of a fluent individual form of writing movement, 
we proceed to discuss one or two of the details of this 
matter of diffusion. 

One of the most noticeable facts about the child's 
diffuse movements is the fact that these movements 
are excessive, especially the movements of the finer mus- 
cles. Somewhere or other the false notion has crept 
into our pedagogy that the child's fine muscles do not 
develop until later than the large muscles. How can 
one believe such a false statement when he sees a young 
infant clutching with its little fingers and exhibiting 
in this grip one of its strongest movements? How can 
one believe this dogma when he sees the boys and girls 
in the first grade doing all the work that they do in 
writing with the fine finger muscles — literally overdo- 
ing this work in a very noticeable degree? The fact 
is, the finer muscles are in full operation very early in 
life. Indeed, they are the muscles which in diffuse 
movements are most apt to be called into action. It 
requires a less powerful excitation from the nervous cen- 
ters to set the fine muscles into action. They contract 



DEVELOPMENT IN WRITING 223 

at the slightest stimulation. These are the muscles 
which always grow tense first in later life when the 
brain becomes overexcited. In emotional excitement, 
for example, it is the fine muscles of the face and hand 
that are first affected. One's fingers are folded into his 
fist long before he strikes the angry blow; one's jaw is 
set long before he speaks the angry word. In short, 
diffusion always exaggerates first of all the movements 
of the fine muscles. 

It is clear, however, from our earlier study of adult 
handwriting that the fingers alone can not do the work. 
The fingers become cramped — they must have an op- 
portunity to straighten out. They must be carried for- 
ward by the arm in order to get across the page. These 
additional arm movements are made by the child, not 
as well-coordinated additions to the finger movements, 
*but rather as separate and clumsy interruptions of the 
finger movement. The child writes with the fingers 
until they are so cramped that he can write no more. 
Then he stops the finger movement entirely and with 
a sigh he carries his hand across the page and settles 
down after this interruption to more writing with the 
fingers. While the finger writing goes on, the hand 
and arm are all the time, through the diffusion of the 
stimulation, kept tense and ready to move. Indeed, 
while we are noticing the fact that the fingers are the 
parts that are most affected by diffusion, do not let us 
fail to recognize the fact that a great many other mus- 
cles are sharing in the diffusion. Not only the writing 
arm is diffusely contracted, but the other arm also is hav- 
ing its part in the agony of effort. Have you not seen the 
left hand under the desk folded in a grip almost strong 



224 GENETIC PSYCHOLOGY FOR TEACHERS 

enough to drive the nails into the flesh? Have you not 
seen the left elbow drawn up against the side as if it 
would fain get over and help the right hand? This is all 
diffusion. So are also the facial contortions and the 
bodily movements and the movements of the legs. The 
bending of the head down to the paper, of which we 
complain so much, and which some people have falsely 
told us can be corrected by using this or that patent 
pen, or desk, or paper, is a natural consequence of the 
diffusion of the motor impulse throughout the whole 
body, and is also the natural bodily expression of in- 
tense visual attention. 

In movement, as in every other sphere, nature 
attacks her problems of development by producing more 
than she needs and then picking out the best. Nature 
produces more flower-seeds in a single year than could 
grow on hundreds of times the amount of soil available 
on this earth, and then she lets the seeds struggle 
against each other until the best and strongest survive. 
And so it is with movement. Nature starts out with a 
diffuse brain as if she would say to the individual, " I 
will not place any restrictions upon you, but will let 
you have at first all the possible movements to select 
from." She stirs up the brain in all directions, and 
the diffuse movements begin to appear in abundance. 
There are movements of the head and arms and feet 
and trunk. Not all are necessary to the final form of 
action, and most will drop away as development goes 
on. But in the whole mass of movement the right ones 
must be there, and development means the selection of 
the right movements out of the total mass of diffuse 
movements. Only one limitation appears in all this 



DEVELOPMENT IN WRITING 225 

provision of many movements. That is the limitation 
we have noted. No mechanism could be devised which 
would not, in the general stimulation of the muscles, 
affect the small muscles more than the large ones. 

This limitation in nature's provision for free 
movement, is the first point at which the teacher's 
rational mode of developing the child must come in to 
supplement nature's provisions. The teacher should 
see to it that if diffusion tends to emphasize the small 
muscles, teaching should emphasize in due measure the 
large muscles. Thus, some teachers begin the teaching 
of writing by free use of the blackboard, because on the 
blackboard the larger movements have better oppor- 
tunity to show themselves. Even if you try this, you 
will notice that through diffusion the fingers grasp the 
crayon too intensely, but yet the larger arm movement 
will be called into play, and that is well. Blackboard 
writing for a whole class, and during many years of 
school training, has many obvious objections, and so it 
is well to devise some other method of supplementing 
nature and of calling the large muscles into play. 
Large arm exercises are the most available devices for 
attaining this end. 

I am well aware that these large arm exercises are by 
no means novelties in our teaching of writing. What 
we need, however, is to come to recognize them, not as 
mere incidental exercises to be taken now and then, but 
as the staple forms of early writing lessons. I am fully 
acquainted with the desire of children and even of 
parents, that the ability to produce actual writing should 
be cultivated as early as possible. I am also aware of 
the fact that teachers do not commonly see any imme- 
15 



22G GENETIC PSYCHOLOGY FOR TEACHERS 

(liate results from these large free exercises. Indeed, 
time and time again, I have seen neat, regular letters 
j)roduced in copy-books by classes who never had any of 
these large arm circles or ovals. But our discussion up 
to this point has failed of its whole aim if you are not 
convinced that neat letters in a copy-book are not the 
ends of writing instruction. You are not succeeding in 
your duties as teachers if you are led by the desires of 
parents and children rather than by the larger con- 
siderations of final development. Look at the children 
who learn to write early, and who learn under a teacher 
who neglects the free exercises. I care not what their 
copy-books contain, look at their hands and arms. See 
them laboriously and in a cramped position carving out 
forms as the ancients used to before the beginning of 
the Christian era. Let us put an end to all this! Let 
us give up the notion of writing too soon, and let us 
train the arm with its larger coordinations, systemat- 
ically and conscientiousl}^ until its movements shall 
become through training coordinate in number and 
importance with the finger movements of which nature 
has furnished such a superabundance. 

If we could have such frequent exercises in arm 
movements we could well afford to leave the ordinary 
writing exercises entirely out of our school programs for 
at least two years. 

I do not wish to be understood as subscribing to the 
doctrine that is being ofi'ered to teachers by certain 
prominent educators, that writing should be left to grow 
up " incidentally " in connection with manual training 
and shop work. Writing seems to me to be too im- 
portant a part of school training, too closely connected 



DEVELOPMENT IN WRITING 227 

with reading, and too complex a form of activity to be 
neglected. Activities of such a complex type may grow 
up incidentally if conditions are not too loose, but then 
they will grow up in what we have called a non-rational 
way. Better far that we should devote the energy of 
the school to a rational cultivation of the right kind 
of movement. Let us have writing exercises, but let 
these exercises be planned to supplement nature, not to 
hurry nature, nor yet to leave the whole task to nature. 

Another important step in supplementing nature, 
besides that which I have mentioned of having many 
free exercises of the large muscles before the school 
writing is taken up, is to recognize and act upon the 
principle that the writing teacher is not concerned 
merely with the hand that does the writing, but is re- 
sponsible for a training of the body as well. During 
the effort to write, the child is wholly unconscious of 
the diffuse movements which keep the other arm and 
the face and the legs in motion. It is not enough to 
tell him to sit up straight from time to time, we must 
train him to sit up straight. The only way to get 
good position in writing is for the teacher to make just 
as much of a point of position as he makes of the work 
done on paper. Eemember that it is the habit of the 
child that you are training, not the end of the pen. 
You can get good copy to show your superintendent 
even if you neglect position, but you can never train 
good writers. 

The third principle I wish to lay down is one that 
involves some dangerous possibilities of misapplication. 
And yet in spite of these possibilities of misuse, I wish 
to emphasize this third principle as perhaps more im- 



228 GENETIC PSYCHOLOGY FOR TEACHERS 

portant than any other. Briefly put it is this, every 
child should be allowed to sit and hold his pen and paper, 
and move his hand in the way best suited to develop his 
own individual mode of action. Every child is an in- 
dividual problem to the teacher. 

I said that this statement involves a good many 
possible dangers. In the hands of a careless or unin- 
terested teacher, a class that is allowed individual liberty 
simply goes wrong at almost every point. Such a class 
does not have, however, what we should call individual 
liberty, it has rather license. The teacher who is care- 
less and lets the children do as they please is by no 
means following the injunction to let the children do 
what is individually best for them. 

I once saw a class in a school where the teachers were 
trying to develop the principle of individual train- 
ing, and in that class about half the children were hold- 
ing the pen between the first and middle fingers. Now, 
I shall by no means make the assertion that this position 
of the pen is bad. On the contrary, I have found that it 
is, in practical life, a very common position of the pen 
— certainly more common than the orthodox position 
which is described as pointing over the right ear. But, 
good or bad, the position of the pen in that class was 
wholly without justification. We found on some in- 
quiry that the position in question had recently been 
imported into the class by a boy in one corner of the 
room, and that it had spread as a sort of fad. The chil- 
dren were many of them having difiiculty with it, but 
it was the fashion, and hence was being accepted. I 
am not sure that children have not a right to intro- 
duce fads into the writing class. Certainly there has 



DEVELOPMENT IN WRITING 229 

been much introducing of fads among tlieir elders. 
But what I object to in this particular case is the 
interpretation which the teacher gave the principle of 
individual training. To leave the child to pick up what- 
ever strikes his fancy is not individual training, it is 
educational anarchy. What that teacher needed to 
learn was the fact which I am trying to make clear in 
this statement to you. Individual training means a 
careful study of individual needs, and a suggestive, 
helpful guidance on the part of the teacher. 

Helpful guidance should try to work out such a 
problem as that on which the children just mentioned 
were working, namely, the problem of holding the pen 
correctly. I often ask teachers whether they have ever 
worked out that problem of holding the pen. I will 
venture the generalization on the basis of a good deal of 
past experience in asking this question that if we could 
get a free expression of opinion on this topic, we should 
find that the directions given in the books are very 
seldom really accepted by teachers themselves, and even 
less frequently accepted by practical people. As a 
matter of adult writing, each of us holds his pen as he 
can best use it. Each of us has determined that posi- 
tion by a good deal of practise and non-rational adjust- 
ment. This lack of uniformity in actual practise is 
the outcome of a system of education which went for- 
Vv'ard according to an assumed rule of uniformity in 
training. How much time do you suppose you and I 
lost because we had to hold our pens in a position 
wholly unadapted to our needs? Are we any better off 
because there was a theoretical rule about pens preached 
to us every day? If not, what would have helped us? 



230 GENETIC PSYCHOLOGY FOR TEACHERS 

Would it not have been better for the teacher to have 
given up preaching a purely theoretical formula about 
how the pen should be held, and to have helped us in 
developing our own way as rapidly and as well as pos- 
sible? It is not an innovation in real life that I am 
asking you to consider. For in real life, the boy or 
girl does, sooner or later, develop his own position in 
spite of his teacher. What I am asking you to consider 
is the advisability of abandoning a false theory of im- 
possible uniformity and of adopting the more rational 
method of helping the boy or girl in what he or she will 
do, and what he ought to do in any case. If this is an 
innovation in pedagogical theory and practise, then 
so much the worse for the theory and practise. 

What I have said about the holding of the pen I 
should like to repeat about many of the other phases of 
writing. I should like to venture even on that most 
delicate of all topics, the topic of the form and slope of 
letters, far enough to say that I believe the day is 
coming when the pedagogical world will be at peace 
on this question, because it will be seen that writing is 
not a question of forms and slopes, but of individual 
habits. After a copy has been set long enough to make 
the young child recognize the fact that the race has 
a better alphabet than he could invent offhand, I be- 
lieve that the copy has lost its chief significance. Let 
the child learn the essential features of this copy by 
drawing the letters ever so carefully at first, if that 
seems best, but do not be guilty of confounding writing 
with drawing. Those teachers who keep the boys and 
girls at the task of making beautiful copy when they 
ought to be writing, will have left us when we grow 



DEVELOPiMENT IN WRITING 231 

wise enough to let each child have his own slope, and it 
will be better for the schools. 

One more suggestion and I am through with the 
part of our discussion which deals with movement. 
Every teacher should try to hasten the cooperation of 
arm movements and finger and hand movements by in- 
sisting on rapid writing as soon as the drawing period 
of the child's training is passed. This again requires a 
pedagogical insight that shall look beyond the dread- 
ful scrawls which will be produced at first. It requires 
insight that sees that the true teaching of writing 
consists in securing beauty and fliiency, not merely 
beauty of form. If beautiful copy is what you insist 
on having at first and always, then do not accept this 
suggestion. But if you can see that the child must 
somehow work out complete coordination of his move- 
ments, and if you can persuade yourself that there 
must be a period of faithful devotion to the devel- 
opment of this coordination under the guidance and 
helpful criticism of a wise teacher, then make it im- 
possible for hand and arm to work apart, by demand- 
ing that the total speed be such as to make separate 
action less convenient than cooperation. If you wish to 
accept this suggestion in a conservative way, introduce 
in the very first years, an exercise of a few minutes in 
rapid writing at the end of a regular copying period. 
But in some form or other consider the advisability of 
cultivating fluency of these movements in school. 

And now there is one more topic on which I have 
to touch very briefly. It is the topic of the child's 
attention during writing. In what direction is the 
child's attention turned? There can be no question 



232 GENETIC PSYCHOLOGY FOR TEACHERS 

about where it is not turned during the early years. It 
is not turned to the meaning of what he writes. I 
think another negative statement can be made on the 
basis of our earlier discussions with equal certainty. 
The child's attention is not turned to his movements. 
When we turn from these negative statements to show 
where the child's attention is turned^, positive state- 
ment must be made in a somewhat more tentative way, 
for the child's attention seems to be divided between 
the copy and his own written letters. Probably his own 
letters are the factors which most naturally attract his 
attention. Every teacher has been drilled into the recog- 
nition of this division of the child's attention between 
copy and the child's own productions, by the effort 
which has to be expended in conforming to what is 
supposed to be the all-important and necessary duty 
of bringing the child back to the copy. 

Let us consider the question of the advisability of 
concentrating so much attention on the copy. In the 
first place, the copy is unquestionably necessary at first. 
It is valuable in that it conveys to the child the ex- 
perience of the race in regard to the advantageous form 
of any given letter. The copy is the social inheritance, 
and we say in effect to the child when we give him 
the copy, " imitate that as you imitate other social 
practises." The child strives to imitate. He comes 
very soon to get the fundamental lines well in mind. 
But now the difficulty is that he can not get regularity 
and fluency enough into his movement to reproduce 
these forms in a practical way. His muscles do not re- 
spond to his mental picture, and he gets poor products. 
We say to him again, this time in so many words, " look 



DEVELOPMENT IN WRITING 233 

at your copy." He looks at his copy, and, without real- 
izing fully the defect in his own work, and certainly 
without having the muscular control to do perfect work, 
he tries again to imitate. 

Would it not be better to stop this mere reference to 
the copy in the hope of attaining non-rational imita- 
tion, and to substitute for the merely imitative attitude, 
a critical attitude on the part of the child toward his 
own work? Do you sujjpose a child would fail to recog- 
nize the fact, if you told him, -that his own I was too flat, 
or his too much opened at the top, quite as easily as he 
could see it by looking at his copy? To be sure, his 
copy would show him these things if he would examine 
it, but he does not ordinarily examine copy under our 
present method of instruction. It takes more training 
than he has to examine copy with a view to making a 
critical comparison with his own work. The copy shows 
certain forms to his eyes, but it does not discuss these 
matters with him as a living, intelligent teacher might. 
Thus, how easy it would be to get a boy to compare his 
own u with his own ri, and he would learn quite as much 
in this way as by looking at copy. Show a boy the in- 
teresting things about his own writing, and you may 
make his improvement of his writing more interesting 
and intelligent. 

Indeed, the strong tendency which shows itself in 
every individual's development is to accept his own 
forms sooner or later in spite of the copy. We ulti- 
Hiately grow tired of trying to recall the impossible, or 
at least impracticable regularity of copy, and we settle 
down to making forms which we consider adequate. 
If our teachers had only thought of this and had only 



234 GENETIC PSYCHOLOGY FOR TEACHERS 

helped us to cultivate proper ideals within our reason- 
able grasp, how much better writers we might be to-day ! 
And now when we have come to occupy the positions of 
teachers, let us give up so much referring of our pupils 
to a dumb copy, and let us try to improve the boy's own 
style by individual criticisms. 

During the first two years of actual writing, after the 
free-arm exercises, the copy may be retained as the 
standard of appeal. After the first year of actual wri- 
ting, the copy need not, and should not, be made the 
chief guide. This first year is what I have referred to 
before as the drawing period of training in the forms 
of letters. After that first year, the form of the letters 
ought to be perfectly familiar. Then appeal to tlie 
child's own sense of symmetry and beauty, and concen- 
trate training on the task of developing fiuency. Allow 
the child some reasonable freedom in the construction 
of his letters, but criticize his writing Avith him. Com- 
pare his iregular letters with his own regular letters. 
Show him how to try again on the basis of his own past 
efforts. In short, substitute a living, rational teacher 
and a self-criticizing pupil for lifeless copy. The only 
value of copy after the form is mastered, consists in its 
repeated, but too often unheeded, exhortation to regu- 
larity and symmetry. After the fifth year there ought 
not to be any need of criticism. If there is, do not be 
afraid to use it, but certainly do not use it in the old 
and non-rational way of presenting mere copy. 

The final problem of writing instruction carries us 
over into our next topic which deals with reading. 
When written characters begin to have meaning, the art 
of reading has generally been developed to a high de- 



DEVELOPMENT IN WRITING 235 

gree. There is one condition necessary to fulfil in the 
development of the movement, before the advantages of 
the art of reading can be fully applied to one's own wri- 
ting. That condition we have already discussed in our 
treatment of the question of the automatic character 
of writing. Eeading can never be applied to writing 
until the attention becomes free in some degree to de- 
vote itself to meaning rather than to form. Just in 
the degree in which the child comes to be free from 
attention to copy and to the form of his own letters, 
just in that degree can he think of meanings. The art 
of seeing meanings in words is, however, a complex 
mental process, not connected merely with a mastery 
of the writing movements. We shall, therefore, treat 
the whole question of seeing meanings in the written 
words, more appropriately in our next discussion. 



CHAPTER VIII 



THE PKOCESS OF READING 



The methods of teaching reading have been very 
radically modified within the memory of our genera- 
tion. The spelling-book with its long lists of uncon- 
nected words as the necessary introduction to reading,, 
is no longer to be found in our schools. The method 
of deciphering new words letter by letter is no longer 
allowed. The monotonous formulas with which the 
first readers used to begin, are gone, with very little 
prospect of ever being heard from again. Instead, we 
have the modern nature-study reader with its phonetic 
alphabet. We have the reedited literary masterpiece 
from which even the primary grade pupil is supposed 
to derive high and worthy thoughts while he is gently 
led, without all the tumult of former days, into the 
intricacies of our unphonotic English orthography. 

It is as if teachers had suddenly cast off the old 
notion that children can not grasp meanings in what 
they read, and had admitted the youngest child into the 
largest possible use of reading as a means of getting 
information. Where the old schoolmaster was satisfied 
to drill his pupils in the forms of reading, was satis- 
fied to take almost any sort of reading material if he 
could only get the right pauses and the proper rising 
236 



THE PROCESS OF READING 237 

and falling inflections, we pass lightly over the formal 
considerations and seek to emphasize the import of 
what is read. We are everywhere seeking the shortest 
possible road to meanings. If a word can be recognized 
as a single whole without breaking it up into its let- 
ters, so much the better, we say, for it is the word as a 
whole that has meaning, not the letters that enter into 
the word. If a new word can be introduced in such 
a connection that its meaning shall be apparent without 
a formal definition, so much the better, we say, for it 
is the meaning in a practical form, not in a stilted 
definition, that we are aiming to cultivate. And so on 
in every detail of our modern reading, it is the mean- 
ing that we are striving to bring out. 

All this is in the fullest accord with the spirit of 
our modern lives. There was once a time when reading 
was a kind of accomplishment. That was in the days 
when reading of Latin was quite as necessary a part of 
a gentleman's education as the reading of English. 
That was in the days when men did not read the news- 
paper every morning and did not have bulky corre- 
spondence to look over in their business. In those 
days a book or two a year, or even less, constituted the 
total reading of a family. The Bible, an almanac or 
two. Pilgrim's Progress, and a few other religious and 
medical works, made up the family library. But within 
a half century how all this has changed ! One almost 
hesitates to count up the amount of reading done by 
even the ordinary man to-day. The common workman 
reads in these days. Of course he cares little for the 
short pauses at commas, and the long pauses at peri- 
ods, and the other formal considerations. He wants 



238 GENETIC PSYCnOLOGY FOR TEACHERS 

the meaning of what he reads. And when his boy or 
girl goes to school, he wants that boy or girl to learn to 
read, not to learn to declaim. He sees, and we teachers 
see, that reading is not an end in itself, but rather a 
means to something higher. 

So eager are we in the pursuit of meanings in our 
teaching of reading that we sometimes fail to realize 
that there are any mechanical and formal requirements 
that must be fulfilled before the child can attend to 
meanings. It is all the easier for us to overlook the 
earlier mechanical steps that lead up to the recogni- 
tion of meaning, because in our developed adult lives 
reading has become, on its mechanical side, a purely 
automatic process. We do not realize that there is 
any process lying between our looking at a printed 
or written word and our recognition of the signifit- 
cance of that word. We do not see the process of 
development through which the individual passes in 
any such way as we see it in the case of writing, 
and so we not only do not realize the complexity of 
the process, but we do not realize that it is there 
at all. 

Our first aim in this study of reading must there- 
fore be to bring to consciousness what does not natu- 
rally present itself to adult consciousness — namely, the 
nature of the process which precedes and conditions 
our recognition of meanings. 

In undertaking a complete study of the reading 
process, attention naturally turns, first of all, to the 
eyes which receive the impressions from the printed 
or written page. It has been possible, by means of pho- 
tographs and by means of recording apparatus attached 



THE PROCESS OP READING 239 

to the eyes of adults, to discover with a good deal of 
exactness just what the eyes do during reading.^ They 
do not travel continuously along the line which is being 
read, but they move along in three or four steps from 
the beginning to the end of the line. That is, they 
move through distances which measure about an inch 
along the printed line, then they pause for a moment, 
and after the pause, move through another inch. After 
crossing the page in this series of steps, they come back 
in one long continuous sweeping movement to the be- 
ginning of the next line and then proceed again by 
steps across the page. 

During each period of movement, the eyes see noth- 
ing. It is only during the pauses between move- 
ments that the eyes see. This has been demonstrated 
in a variety of ways by some of the ingenious scientific 
investigators who have studied the problem of how the 
eyes behave during reading. There is one very simple 
way of demonstrating these facts, to which Professor 
Dodge has called attention.^ Take a looking-glass and 
try to see your own eyes move. They will neve? be 
seen moving. During actual movement, the eyes do 
not see anything. It is only when they stand still and 
fixate some point that conscious recognition is possible. 
It is evident, then, that the points where the eyes stop 
in their steps across the page are the points of inter- 
est to us in our study of reading. At such points the 
eyes see before and behind, taking in all the surround- 

^ Erdmann and Dodge, Psychologisehe Untersuehungen liber 
das Lesen, 1898. Huey, Amer. Jour, of Psychology, 1900, p. 283. 

^ Psychological Review, vol. vii (1900), p. 456, and in earlier 
works there referred to. 



210 GENETIC PSYCnOLOGY FOR TEACHERS 

ing letters at a single glance and then step on to the 
next point of fixation. 

The number of points of fixation is of interest to 
lis, for this number shows us what is the range of letters 
or words that can be taken in at a single glance. Make 
the observation for yourself sometime. Sit down in 
front of some one who is reading, and notice how the 
eyes move. Count the number of steps in passing across 
a line. You will find that the number of steps will 
differ from line to lino and from individual to indi- 
vidual. It would be an interesting study if some one 
would make a table of the different ways in which 
different individuals move their eyes across a given 
line of print. Think, for example, of the difference 
between an adult and a child in this respect. A few 
observations that I have made, show that children move 
the eyes very slowly across the page, taking many 
more steps than do adults. How many such steps 
a child takes, one can sometimes see from the way 
in which the child uses the finger to point to the 
place. The finger is a kind of landmark to aid the 
eyes in their fixation, and it helps in keeping the path 
during the long journey through the jungle of letters 
where short, uncertain steps are in danger of going 
astray. 

These facts of movement are of importance when we 
study the process of recognition of words. It is evi- 
dent from the very movements that in adult life we 
do not treat the letters as separate objects of attention. 
We look at the letters in groups. This fact has been 
demonstrated in certain other experiments dealing with 
the time required to recognize words. It has been 



THE PROCESS OP READING 2ll 

found ^ that the time required to recognize short words 
made up of four or five letters, is no greater than the 
time required to recognize a single letter standing by 
itself. The movement of the eye corresponds thus 
directly to the movement of the attention. Both the 
eye and the attention move across the line in steps or 
stages, not in continuous recognition of each successive 
letter. 

We come thus upon a new confirmation of the 
principle which we laid down in the fifth chapter. You 
remember that we there called attention to the fact 
that the impressions made upon the eyes might be the 
same in the child's life and in the life of the adult, 
and that the movement made in response to these im- 
pressions might be very difllerent. This movement, or 
fact of expression, stands, furthermore, as we there 
pointed out, in very much closer relation to the mental 
development of the individual than does the fact of 
impression. jSTo better confirmation of all this could 
be found than that which we find in the like impres- 
sions from the printed page which come to the child 
and the adult, and the utterly unlike movements of the 
trained and untrained eyes as they move across the 
page. The stage of mental development attained in 
these two cases is indicated by the kind of movement, 
not by the kind of impression. 

There is another group of movements connected 
with our adult recognition of words which serve to em- 
phasize the principle so obvious from our study of the 
eye movements. This second group of movements con- 

^ Prof. J. McK. Cattell, Philosophisclic Studien, vol. iii, p. 485. 
16 



242 GENETIC PSYCHOLOGY FOR TEACHERS 

sists in certain involuntary tendencies to articulation 
which always accompany our reading. 

You must have noticed, at some time or other, some 
adult who was moving his lips in inaudible whispers 
as he read with profound attention from the news- 
paper or from some written or printed page. If you 
have never noticed an adult doing this, you are cer- 
tainly familiar enough with the tendency of children 
to do it to such an extent that the whisper becomes at 
times even audible. What that adult does with his lips, 
and what children often do so intensely, we all of us 
do in some degree with our vocal cords and other 
organs of articulation. Indeed, not only in reading, 
but even in thinking, we always tend to speak the word 
which we have in mind. So that we may lay it down 
as a general fact that recognition of a word, or thought 
about a word, is always accompanied by a tendency to 
articulate that word. 

It is an interesting story of scientific investigation 
that lies back of the best demonstration which we have 
of this fact of involuntary whispering when we think of 
words. Two Danish scientists ^ became interested in 
some English investigations of what is known as telep- 
athy. Telepathy is the name for ttte supposed process 
of thought transference. There are some people who 
believe that one mind can aflfect another at a distance, 
in such a way as to make the other mind think the 
thoughts of the first, and they call such influence of 
mind upon mind " telepathic influence." Two English 

^ Hansen and Lehmann, Ueber unwillkiirliches Flilstern, Phi- 
losophische Studien, vol. xi, p. 471. 



THE PROCESS OF READING 243 

scientists made some experiments on telepathy. Their 
investigations consisted in a carefully recorded series 
of trials which aimed to determine whether one person 
who was sitting at the end of a long corridor and think- 
ing intently of a certain number, could influence the 
thoughts of a second person at the other end of the 
hall, sufficiently to result in the second person's guess- 
ing the right number. The person who thought the 
number was, of course, to think to himself and in no 
way to communicate with the guesser at the other end 
of the hall. The English investigators, after a very 
carefully conducted series of such experiments, found 
that the guesser had succeeded in getting the right 
number a good many times, and they concluded that 
there must have been some sort of transfer of thought. 
The Danish scientists who became interested in 
these experiments on telepathy were doubtful as to the 
conclusion that thought had been transferred. They said 
that perhaps it was some form of physical energy that 
had carried the communication from one person to the 
other. At any rate, they thought of a way of deciding 
whether or not it was physical energy. All forms of 
physical energy can be focused. You know, doubtless, 
how sound can be focused just as well as light. So 
the Danish investigators repeated the English experi- 
ments, with this modification — they put the thinker 
and the guesser at the foci of two focusing sound mir- 
rors; and they found that the number of right guesses 
was decidedly increased. But where did the sound 
come from ? The thinker had been perfectly sincere in 
the experiment, and had produced no sound so far as 
he knew. The rest of the demonstration is what inter- 



244 GENETIC PSYCHOLOGY FOR TEACHERS 

ests us in our study. The thinker had been involun- 
tarily whispering the number with every expiration of 
breath from his lungs. The more intensely he thought 
of the number, the more firmly his vocal cords and 
other organs of articulation became set for the name 
of the number of which he thought. The air breathed 
out with each expiration v/as enough to give slight 
sounds, and these slight whispers when focused, helped 
the guesser even more than they had helped him before 
being focused. 

Every time we concentrate attention on a word, ac- 
cordingly, whether it be in reading or in the mere effort 
to think of the word, we tend to make a movement of 
articulation. The investigations just reported are not 
the only ones which prove the truth of this assertion. 
Some years ago Professor Miinsterberg ^ tried some ex- 
periments on the remembering of words. He found 
that if he prevented the person who was trying to learn 
certain words from making the appropriate articulation 
movements by requiring him to hum a tune, or to say 
ah, ah, ah, continually, the process of remembering 
was much interfered with. This experiment has been 
repeated by a number of investigators with many modi- 
fications, and it always gives the same results; showing 
that the normal accompaniment of attention to words 
is a movement of articulation. 

These movements of articulation, like the move- 
ments of the eyes across the page, correspond, not to 
the single letters that make up the visual impression, 

1 Zeitschrift fiir Psychologie und Physiologie der Sinnesor- 
gaiie, vol. i. 



THE PROCESS OP READING 245 

but rather to the words as wholes. Indeed, in their 
most highly developed form they may undergo a fur- 
ther reduction which we do not understand very fully, 
by which a single unitary movement may correspond 
to a whole group of words, rather than to even the 
single words. 

These facts of active adjustment of the individual 
in his reading, are certainly the results of development- 
Progressive development turns in the direction of 
greater and greater complexity in both articulation and 
the recognition process. Given the letters in words and 
the words in sentences as the material for comprehen- 
sion, the individual learns to take up these impressions 
and group them. This grouping of the elementary 
impressions into larger wholes is one of the most essen- 
tial facts in the growth of recognition, and, as we have 
seen, it is always paralleled by some corresponding 
form of bodily activity. 

So important for our consideration is this fusion 
of letters into words and of words into sentences that 
we must dwell upon it with some detail. We are for- 
tunate in having a scientific record which will throw 
light on our discussion of this matter. The scientific 
record is not directly related to the common process 
of reading printed or written characters — it relates 
rather to the reading of the telegraphic language. It 
is somewhat easier to get a record of what one does 
in the process of acquiring ability to read telegraphic 
messages. In the first place, telegraphy is learned at 
a period in life when one can experiment more easily 
with the learner. One can measure results more easily, 
too, for the letters of the Morse alphabet require an 



246 GENETIC PSYCHOLOGY FOR TEACHERS 

appreciable time for transmission and reception, and 
the time furnishes a good means of measurement. We 
have very little data on the manner of developing the 
ordinary habit of reading print or writing. Children 
are very difficult to investigate in such matters, and 
the processes of reading are always difficult to measure. 
It is to be hoped that some day, through a careful 
study of the development of eye movements, we may 
have a direct record, throwing light on the character 
of the fusion of letters into words and words into 
phrases in ordinary reading. In the meantime, we 
shall get such light as we can from the investigations 
of Bryan and Harter ^ on the development of ability 
to receive and send telegraphic messages. 

The character of the investigations is not diffi- 
cult to understand. Men who were learning to receive 
and send telegraphic letters, were tested at the end of 
each week of practise as to the number of letters they 
could send and receive per minute, and the results for 
a period of months were recorded in the curves repro- 
duced in Figs. 29 and 30. 

The curves in Fig. 29 represent the improvement 
of a single learner in a period of forty weeks. The 
upper curve is the sending curve ; the lower is the curve 
for receiving. Notice two facts, first, that the learner 
shows more rapid improvement in sending than in re- 
ceiving. The parallel to this fact in reading is that 
one must learn the active side of reading, especially 
the articulation side, before he learns to receive ideas 
from the printed page. We have seen how *the art of 



^ Psychological Review, vol. vi (1899), p. 346. 



THE PROCESS OF READING 247 

writing was influenced in its development by the fact 
that men had a well-developed sound language before 
they began to write, we must never lose sight of the 
fact that our teaching of reading always follows the 



IhO 


k 


Wc&ks of Practise 
8 12 16 20 2U 28 32 36 hO 


■ r 


1 1 1 1 1 1 




130 


. 


Scttctf^g, , "' " 




120 


- 


^^''^ 




:ino 

$100 
^ 00 


- 


y ^ 


^^^ 


h so 
£ TO 

:^Bo 


- 


/"^ Slowest Main Line Rate / 




/ 


^ ^^--^^^^^^^^^^^^^ 




UO 


- / 


y^ 




so 


-I 


y 




20 


- j yT 






10 


'// 







Fig. 29. 
Sending and receiving rates of student Will J. Reynolds. Tested 
weekly by Noble Harter at Western Union telegraph office, 
Brookville, Ind. 

acquirement of ability to speak. The recognition of a 
word as a whole is one of the important factors, as we 
have seen, in adult reading. The articulation, which* is 
of words as wholes, is developed as an active fact, before 
the recognition of written words as wholes is possible. 
Indeed, one may insist in reading, as in writing, that 
before the attention is free to get meanings from writ- 
ten words there must be a full development of the 
activities, that is of the articulations and of eye move- 
ments. These must become automatic and must be 



248 GENETIC PSYCHOLOGY FOR TEACHERS 

disposed of fully in order to leave attention free for 
the higher process of fusion of words with thought. 
This lesson of the earlier development of the active 
processes is the first fact that conies to us from a study 
of Fig. 29. 

The second fact which you should note in Fig. 29 
is that improvement in sending and improvement in 
receiving, follow different courses. Notice how the 
sending curve gradually rises to its full height in a 
regular sweep. There are minor irregularities, to be 
sure, weeks when the improvement is somewhat slower 
than usual, but on the average the improvement follows 
a fairly regular course. With the receiving curve it is 
very different. At first it shoots up regularly, some- 
what like the sending curve, and then suddenly, in this 
case at about the fifteenth week, it begins to show no 
further signs of improvement. Here comes the long 
level part of the curve which the authors of the inves- 
tigation have called a plateau. This is one of those 
discouraging periods which you all recognize from 
your school experiences, when there is no marked im- 
provement, just a standing still as it seems. But do not 
be discouraged by these plateaus, for as you see in our 
curve, there comes ultimately an end of the period of 
standing still and then there is another sudden rise. 
This plateau represents in education a necessary pe- 
riod of readjustment and assimilation. It is a period 
of preparation. 

We must interest ourselves further in this difference 
between the sending and the receiving curve. It is 
not enough to say that the growth of ability to receive 
passes through a period of delay until certain steps of 



THE PROCESS OP READING 



249 



development can be fully prepared. We are interested 
in knowing definitely what these processes of develop- 
ment are. The investigators of the telegraphic lan- 
guage have given us a good deal of light on this prob- 
lem by their later investigations recorded in Fig. 30. 

Here they show in the upper curve the same kind of 
a receiving curve with its plateau, as that which we have 



lOS 


WcGks of Practise 
8 12 16 20 2U 


2S 




1 i 1 1 1 


1 


A 


96 


/■ 






«S^ 


/ 






s 


Slowest Main Line Rate J 






^ .. . 




. 


t; 6u 

§ AS 
)^ 36 


^^ Jif^i'^ Letters 







-^^"^^""^^ 




su 


^^ 






12 


- 
















Fig. 30. 
Receiving rates of student John Shaw, Brooke ille, Ind. 
began with seventh week of practise. 



Tests 



already studied in Fig. 39. This upper curve in this 
figure shows what could be done under the ordinary con- 
ditions where the letters united to form words, the words 
in turn entering into sentences. The middle curve of 
Fig. 30 shows the rate of improvement in the reception 
of words which did not form sentences. This curve shows, 
accordingly, what happens when letters unite to form 



250 GENETIC PSYCHOLOGY FOR TEACHERS 

words, but the words are unrelated. Finally, the lowest 
curve shows the rate of receiving isolated letters which 
did not form words at all. The interesting and signifi- 
cant fact about these three curves when thus compared, 
is that they explain the meaning of the plateau. The 
plateau comes at the point in the curve where the power 
to receive the words as isolated factors has been fully 
developed. It remains for the learner to fuse the words 
into sentences in order to make more rapid reception 
of whole sentences possible. The plateau represents 
this period during which consciousness is gaining suf- 
ficient mastery of single words to make possible the 
fusion of words into phrases. Certain lower fusions 
have to be made, for the end of the plateau comes only 
when these lower fusions are taken up into higher 
fusions. It requires a long period of assimilation to 
prepare for this larger fusion, but with the ability to 
make the fusion, the rapid advance after the plateau 
begins. 

There are other examples of a similar type which 
illustrate this kind of development through a plateau 
period. Time and time again it has been noticed by 
those who are learning some foreign language, that there 
is a most discouraging period when one does not seem 
to make any progress. You begin to learn your Ger- 
man, for example. You learn new words each day, and 
think you must soon have enough to be able to under- 
stand what is said to you. You find yourself even able 
to speak short sentences that you have worked out — but 
the time of understanding is not yet. You go on and 
on without seeming to advance a step, until suddenly 
you wake up some morning with a consciousness that 



THE PROCESS OF READING 251 

you can understand whole sentences. You have passed 
the plateau. 

These plateaus, or periods of preparation for higher 
fusions, are more numerous than our curve in Fig. 30 
indicates. This particular plateau in the figure is, as 
we have said, the one which represents the growth of 
power to fuse words into significant sentences. It 
might be compared directly to a certain period in 
children's lives as they learn to read. All of you 
know that period when children read word by word. 
There is no expression or modulation, just a separate 
articulation of each word. If you ask the boys to do 
exhibition reading at this period in life, they exultantly 
shout out each word as if it were a triumphant success 
to get that word out, whatever becomes of the rest of 
the sentence. The next step in the reading instruction 
after this conquest of words, is to prepare for just 
such a step of fusion as that which is represented in 
our curve of telegraphic language, the fusion of words 
into sentences. 

This one kind of fusion is, however, as we said a 
moment ago, not the only kind of fusion involved in the 
reading habit. There is the first fusion of all, when the 
child comes to connect a written letter or word with his 
spoken language. We do not think of this fusion of 
sound with written letters very often in our analysis of 
reading. Generally, children brought up in homes 
where reading is common, know something about the 
art before they come to school. They have already 
taken the first step. Something of the advantage that 
comes to our school work through these early fusions of 
written words with sounds can be understood when we 



252 GENETIC PSYCHOLOGY FOR TEACHERS 

think of that long period during which the race had to 
struggle with the problem of passing from pictorial wri- 
ting to a sound aljDhabet. Or one can find present-day 
illustrations of the same fact by going to some institu- 
tion for deaf-mutes where this connection between writ- 
ten words and movements of the organs of articulation 
has to be laboriously worked out. It would be a most 
enlightening experience for every teacher in our schools 
to see the methods of training deaf-mutes. 

After the first general recognition of the fact that 
written letters may represent articulations, there is the 
process of fusion which combines letters into single 
words. This is a complicated problem. It deserves 
more careful study than it has ever received. Let us 
try, if we can, to understand something of the complex- 
ity of this process. Suppose, to begin with, that the 
child had to be taught to read Chinese. You will recall 
the fact mentioned in the last chapter, that the Chinese 
have a separate character for each word. The process 
of fusion in each case of a Chinese symbol consists, 
therefore, in uniting with a certain written figure a 
certain articulation. The articulation is all ready 
when the reading of the symbol begins, because of the 
child's knowledge of oral language. All that is neces- 
sary, therefore, is to fuse a known articulation with a 
written symbol. This requires some attention to the 
symbol to distinguish it from other symbols, and also 
requires some effort in bringing about the fusion. 

The case that we have assumed is the case that par- 
allels exactly what w^e do in our modern methods of 
teaching reading when we teach in the first years, words 
as single wholes. I think that this method of teaching 



THE PROCESS OF READING 253 

has the largest possible justification in the fact that the 
child's articulations which are factors of these early 
fusions, correspond to words as wholes rather than to 
single letters or parts of words. The most natural 
fusion is always the one for which the child's past ex- 
perience has partly prepared him. 

It would be a relatively simple matter to follow this 
method of associating word articulations with word sym- 
bols, if it were not for the fact that we soon find it neces- 
sary to analyze both symbol and articulation into ele- 
ments. The Chinese language is exceedingly clumsy 
because it has never made such an analysis. Our wri- 
ting and reading is capable of the greatest possible 
range of recombinations because we have elementary 
forms as the material for our writing, and elementary 
sounds as the basis of our articulation. This use of ele- 
ments in writing our language calls for a new phase of 
training which is never demanded of the Chinese child. 
We can get at the elements, after our first fusion of 
articulation wholes with word symbols, only by a process 
of analysis. Such analysis in our English writing and 
reading is made doubly difficult by the fact that the 
elements of articulation do not correspond in all cases 
to the elements of the printed word. We all of us real- 
ize this fact. Our alphabet and written symbols come 
with few modifications from the ancient Phenicians. 
The alphabet represented doubtless with some degree of 
accuracy the fundamental elements of both writing and 
articulation for the ancient language. But when we 
adopt this ancient, oriental alphabet, and try to fit it to 
our northern and modern language with its new sounds, 
we find difficulties innumerable. This is, however. 



254 GENETIC PSYCHOLOGY FOR TEACHERS 

what we have to do. We have to take written and ar- 
ticulated words and analyze them until we come to the 
elements of each. 

This process of analysis was what the old spelling- 
book and letter method of teaching reading delighted 
in carrying out. Indeed, the old method began with 
the elements and after seeing to it that the child 
mastered the elements, the old method went about the 
building up of words in a synthetic way. I think we 
do better to follow the more natural order. Let the 
child synthesize or fuse written symbol and articulation 
first, and then let him analyze from the material in his 
own consciousness. The warning we need in our mod- 
ern methods is that the analysis must not be omitted. 

It is so easy when we have trained the child to attach 
the right articulation to a word symbol to believe that 
we have given him the same mastery over the word that 
the adult has. But we have not. The adult attaches 
the right articulation to a given group of letters because 
the combination of letters is thoroughly under his con- 
trol as a combination of elements. It is a mere ques- 
tion of method of procedure whether you shall give this 
full mastery of the word through a placing of elements 
together as the old method did, or through an analysis 
of the whole into its elements as the newer methods 
should. The final stage in either case will be a mastery 
of both elements and combination. This is what must 
be had before development can be complete. The 
trouble with some of our teaching by words rather than 
letters, is that we sometimes believe that the mastery of 
elements can be left to take care of itself. It can not. 
We must teach our children how to break up articula- 



THE PROCESS OF READING 255 

tions and written words into their elements. This is a 
necessary preparatory analysis before later and more 
complex forms of synthesis can be possible. 

Now come back to the child who learns the fusion of 
a word symbol with a given articulation, as the Chinese 
child does. What shall be the next step? Again I be- 
lieve that our modern method is right in that it begins 
the analysis with an analysis first of the articulation 
process which is under the child's control, rather than 
with an analysis of the inherited and wholly artificial 
written symbols. We ought to begin analysis with 
some sort of phonetic method. I do not know of 
any phonetic system that is free from objections. But 
we have had this idea too short a time to work it out 
fully. That we are on the right road is clear. Let us 
keep on. The combined experience of individual 
teachers is the only thing that can make the method 
perfect. Get the principle, and become a worker your- 
self in the field of constructive method-making. 

The phonetic analysis is the starting-point of 
analysis, but analysis must not be governed entirely by 
phonetic considerations, for our problem is ultimately 
to come to a combination of phonetic elements and al- 
phabetic elements. The perfect analytic method toward 
which we have to work is one that passes from purely 
phonetic divisions, and that very rapidly, to observa- 
tion of the corresponding letter divisions. Good spell- 
ing results from an acquired habit of observing the 
elements of words. Good spelling is very easy if atten- 
tion is trained in this direction early in life, it is difficult 
if attention gets a wrong bent. There can be no doubt 
that we tend in our modern methods to neglect analysis. 



256 GENETIC PSYCHOLOGY FOR TEACHERS 

This neglect of analysis is one of the natural and most 
serious results of our modern desire to get at the higher 
forms of fusion as soon as possible. We are striving so 
constantly to grasjj wholes in their totality that we fail 
to see that the wlioles are made up of elements. Let us 
correct this fault. The older methods from their very 
nature avoided this, which is our most radical fault. 

Enough has been said to show how complex and in- 
volved is the fusion of letters into words, and of words 
with appropriate articulations. But these preliminary 
fusions must take |3lace before fully developed reading is 
possible. After these preliminary fusions, comes the 
stage of fusion illustrated in Fig. 30, the fusion of 
words into phrases and sentences. Connected with this 
last fusion and, indeed, probably as an essential phase of 
the process, is the completion of the fusion already 
begun in the earlier processes, namely the fusion of 
written or printed words with thoughts or meanings. 

The complete recognition of the meaning of a word 
is one of the final stages of development. The recogni- 
tion of the sounds connected with letters, the fusion of 
these elementary sounds into a single articulation are 
all preliminary processes. The attention can not be free 
to take up meaning easily and fully until these prelim- 
inary stages have been passed through. It was pointed 
out at the beginning of this chapter that our modern 
teaching of reading is in some danger of overlooking 
all these necessary preliminaries to the recognition of 
meanings. I hope that statement is clear by this time. 
The meaning which comes so easily in adult writing and 
in adult reading, is possible only because the prelimi- 
nary processes have become automatic. Let us not for- 



THE PROCESS OP READING 257 

get the similarity between the more obvious organizing 
processes in writing and the less obvious, but no less 
necessary, organizing processes in reading. 

And now as we attack the problem of the final fusion 
between meaning and written or printed form, we shall 
certainly not lose sight of the suggestions that grow out 
of our past discussions. The processes of fusion which 
we have discussed up to this time are not mere receptive 
processes, they are all intimately connected with certain 
forms of activity. When the eye moves in such a way 
as to indicate that words and phrases are taken in as 
single wholes, we can not fail to see the relation of the 
active individual to the process of fusion. And when 
the words of a sentence fuse with the thought which 
they express, surely there must be some active processes 
connected with this higher form of fusion. 

I think we shall have no difficulty in recognizing 
the truth of this statement if we go back to our earlier 
discussion of the boy or girl who reads by pronouncing 
separate words, before those words are fused into sen- 
tences. Compare the active expressions of such an un- 
trained reader with those of one who knows the thought 
of the whole sentence, and how different are the two ! 
The fusion of the words into a significant sentence will 
be expressed by a single rising or falling inflection run- 
ning through the whole group of words. The sentence 
thus becomes a single expression. It has elements, to 
be sure, but the elements are not held apart any more 
than are the elements of the fully developed movement 
in writing. They are fused into a single active utter- 
ance. This appears nowhere more clearly than in sen- 
tences that convey some emotional thought. Then, 
17 



258 GENETIC PSYCHOLOGY FOR TEACHERS 

even the rate of articulation may change and help to 
express the emotional character of the thought. There 
may also be added to the emotional articulation of the 
words some other bodily expression such as a straining 
of the tension of arm muscles, as in anger. The hear- 
ing of some sentences or even the silent reading of 
them, may send the blood surging to the brain in a 
new and distinct response to the thought of the sen- 
tence as a whole. Such reactions as these are not reac- 
tions to the words, they are reactions to the thought. 
They appear at a stage of development in which there 
is being worked out a form of fusion higher than that 
which comes in the mere fusing of articulations and 
single words. 

The emotional reactions which we have found en- 
tering so naturally into our discussion, are perhaps the 
most obvious reactions accompanying these higher 
fusions, but they are by no means the only forms. Take 
some simple sentence and try by an examination of your 
own mental process to see what enters into your under- 
standing of its meaning. It makes no great difference 
for our discussion at this stage wliether the words with 
which we start are read, or heard, or merely thought 
of. The preliminary fusions of written words with ar- 
ticulations are different from the preliminary fusions 
of words that are heard with the same articulations. But 
once let words that are heard, and words that are writ- 
ten, be brought up to the point where they can take on 
meanings, and the further process will be the same in 
either case. The taking on of meaning is a form of 
fusion which is alike for words written or spoken. And if 
you would understand this process of taking on mean- 



THE PROCESS OP READING 259 

ings you must make, as I have said, a very careful analy- 
sis of the process in your mind, for a superficial analysis 
may lead you astray. 

It has been a favorite formula in much of our science 
to say that the meaning of a word consists in a whole 
series of images of the object to which the word refers, 
this host of images hovering as it is supposed somewhere 
in memory. A sentence in like manner has been de- 
scribed as associated with a train of images also hover- 
ing in memory. But one is led to ask, why this train of 
images? Is that the end of recognition of meanings — 
just to have a series of pictures in the mind ? Certainly 
not. Pictures when they are called up by words are 
merely the intermediate stages of a more complete 
process. Every recognition of meaning ultimately re- 
sults in some appropriate total reaction. All our earlier 
discussions of action and its relation to mental life con- 
firm this conclusion. This conclusion gives us the best 
and highest view of mental life, for under it we 
think of mental processes as contributing to our adapta- 
tion to our broader environment. In securing adapta- 
tion, there is no place for mere passive pictures in 
the mind. Pictures must lead to action, and pictures 
do lead to action. One can not see a picture of a ham- 
mer without feeling his fingers reaching for its handle. 
One can not look down a steep precipice without think- 
ing either of the leap or of turning away to avoid a fall. 
Pictures are carriers of meaning. When they come into 
the mind they bring with them as their ultimate conse- 
quences some kind of reactions. 

The ultimate value of words when fiised with mean- 
ings, appears most clearly in the cases of thoroughly 



260 GENETIC PSYCHOLOGY FOR TEACHERS 

familiar words. In these cases the intermediate pictures 
are not needed. If they were ever present they have 
disappeared in the course of development. The familiar 
word passes at once into a reaction. Let me say to you, 
for example, " here are twelve dollars go and spend 
them/' and I venture the guess that you did not think 
of my single words at all. You had only the haziest sort 
of a picture, if indeed you had any, of how the twelve 
dollars would look. The first thing you catch in 
consciousness as a result of my sentence is a feeling of 
yourself in some store doi7ig what we were talking about 
your doing. If we had all the necessary apparatus at- 
tached to your muscles we should find them responding 
to the words that went into your ears with actual mus- 
cular contractions which faintly, hut no less surely, tend 
to realize the command to " go and spend it." 

Professor James will help us again in our effort 
to make this idea clear. Pie writes on page 27 of 
his Talks to Teachers as follows : " No truth, how- 
ever abstract, is ever perceived, that will not probably 
at some time influence our earthly action. You must 
remember that, when I talk of action here, I mean 
action in the widest sense. I mean speech, I mean wri- 
ting, I mean yeses and noes, and tendencies ' from ' 
things and tendencies * toward ' things, and emotional 
determinations; and I mean them in the future as well 
as in the immediate present. As I talk here, and you 
listen, it might seem as if no action followed. You 
might call it a purely theoretic process, with no practical 
result. But it must have a practical result. It can not 
take place at all and leave your conduct unaffected. If 
not to-day, then on some far future day, you will answer 



THE PROCESS OF READING 261 

some question differently by reason of what you are 
thinking now. Some of you will be led by my words 
into new veins of inquiry, into reading special books. 
These will develop your opinion, whether for or against. 
That opinion will in turn be expressed, will receive 
criticism from others in your environment, and will 
effect your standing in their eyes. We can not escape 
our destiny, which is practical ; and even our most theo- 
retic faculties contribute to its working out." 

This development of all mental life toward prac- 
tical activities is the most fundamental educational 
ideal which we have derived from the general doctrine 
of development. The place of reading in the develo]^- 
ment toward action wdll be obvious from a study of 
the way in which impression and resulting activity are 
related at different stages of development. The 
simplest case of activity, long before reading begins, is 
that in which impression passes at once into its appro- 
priate reaction without even a word or thought inter- 
vening. This is the case illustrated when we start at 
a loud clap of thunder. Then come in order of their 
complexity, less direct forms of reaction in which we do 
not respond to the impression directly, but pass from 
impression to some suggested thought, some suggested 
image perhaps, and so on through this suggested thought 
or image to the appropriate reaction. This is the case 
when I hear a clock strike and think of my engagement 
and go to meet it. Indirect responses of this type come 
to be more and more elaborate in higher and higher de- 
velopment, and it is as an aid to such indirect reaction 
that language finds its great value. I see an object and 
think first of its name. The name suggests a further 



262 GENETIC PSYCHOLOGY FOR TEACHERS 

train of thought leading ultimately to action. The ad- 
vantage of such a system of words is that some one else 
may often do the first stages of the reacting for me. The 
scientist sees the object and investigates it, and gives 
us the results of his developed recognition of meaning 
in words, and we can pass from words to the appro- 
priate bodily response by following what he has put 
into words. 

Words are of value only when they arouse some- 
thing more than mere articulations; they must arouse 
ultimately reactions appropriate to their remoter mean- 
ings. So long as a word arouses an articulation as its 
only response it is an end in itself. It does not serve 
its highest purpose as a link in a chain of indirect re- 
actions. This is nowhere better shown than in the fact 
that as words become more and more familiar the mere 
articulatory activity is more and more reduced. The 
most familiar words tend to pass directly into appro- 
priate reactions. Take such a familiar word as " high " 
for example. One feels himself tending to roll his eyes 
upward when he hears or sees the word. The inter- 
mediate steps of reception of the impression, articula- 
tion, interpretation, have all faded into relative insig- 
nificance, and the final act comes without noticeable 
delay. This is an advanced form of development and 
shows that the fusion between word and meaning has 
reached its most advanced stage. 

The line of thought which I have sought to bring 
out in this discussion of the relation of action and 
meanings is so rich in its suggestions to the teacher 
that it would require a whole volume to complete all 
the possible lines of application into which it leads 



THE PROCESS OP READING 263 

us. Our whole system of modern education is get- 
ting at the fact that a real meaning involves direct 
contact with objects and direct manipulation of them. 
We try to give a child some reactions with which to 
build up these highest fusions with words, and we do 
well in doing this. Training which gives meaning to 
words is always practical training. Not narrow train- 
ing in some single craft, but training in the broad 
recognition of our adaptive relations to the objects 
about us. And such training in the use of words is 
highly practical also in the possibilities which it brings 
to us of acquiring new indirect adaptations from our 
fellows. 

The cultivation of this ability to receive adaptive 
suggestions indirectly is, let us repeat it, one of the 
highest stages of development. A very large part of 
the justification for the existence of our schools is to be 
sought in the necessity of bringing our children into 
full possession of language in order that they may bor- 
row from the experiences of others and thus get knowl- 
edge indirectly. 

The outline study of the process of reading which 
* we have taken up, ought to suggest to you some of the 
yet unsolved problems. How are we to make the me- 
chanical side of reading most complete without making 
articulation an end in itself? How are we to do our full 
duty in calling attention to the analytic work necessary 
for spelling and yet get at the synthetic processes as 
rapidly as possible? How are we to make language 
really productive as a means to adaptation? These are 
problems that we shall not solve satisfactorily until we 
understand the inner nature of the reading process. 



264 GENETIC PSYCHOLOGY FOR TEACHERS 

It is with this group of problems then, that I leave 
you. Some hints we have had of their solution, but 
we need more study. More study on the part of in- 
dividual teachers who see the meaning of the problems 
and then go forward to their solution. 



CHAPTER IX 

THE IDEA OP NUMBER 

The use of numbers is quite as ancient as the ear- 
liest forms of writing, and may have been even earlier. 
Our word calculate and all the Avords from the same 
root, are derived from an ancient Latin word meaning 
pebble. This carries us back in thought to an early 
period when, instead of making the simple marks which 
were very early used in keeping tally, primitive man 
laid aside a pebble for each unit as he counted, and the 
pebble was his tally-mark. 

Or again, as we study the names used by primitive 
peoples for their numerals, we find them bearing un- 
equivocal testimony to the fact that men counted on 
their fingers long before they tried to mark down the 
results of this counting. Thus, a student ^ of the Zuiii 
language tells us that the Zuni word for one (top'in te) 
means " take down to start with," that is, fold down the 
little finger; and the word for two (kwil-li) means 
" put down with," or put down the next one with the 
little finger. The Zuilis still count by starting with all 
the fingers stretched out and folding down one finger 
for each tally. They always begin with the little finger. 

^ Fr. H. Gushing, in Amer. Anthropologist, vol. v (1893). 

265 



266 GENETIC PSYCHOLOGY FOR TEACHERS 

Their names for three, and so on, are of the same charac- 
ter as the names given, and indicate the origin of their 
whole system of counting from the hand. One hardly 
needs to recall that the decimal system which we follow, 
is evidence of the influence of the ten fingers in devel- 
oping our own system before there were even primitive 
means of keeping tally. As a matter of well-known fact, 
our decimal system is by no means the best system that 
could have been devised if men had been mathemati- 
cians from the first. A better system would have been 
one based on twelve. Indeed, we have this system in 
our measurements of time and in our measurements of 
circles, both of which were borrowed, not from the 
natural system of keeping tally on the hands, but from 
the Babylonian scientists. 

But while men used number very early, they never 
succeeded in carrying numerical processes to any very 
high degree of perfection until in comparatively recent 
centuries. The Egyptians had a most clumsy arithme- 
tic. We are told that in order to add fractions, the 
Egyptians were obliged to raise these fractions to the 
denominator sixty, instead of to some simple common 
denominator such as we use. Even the Greeks and Ko- 
mans had a very unwieldy system of notation. We are 
all acquainted with the Roman numerals. They can 
never be set down in columns to be added; and multi- 
plication is a bewildering process if one undertakes it 
with this system of notation. 

Even while number processes were thus at a rela- 
tively low stage, and while number notation was still 
very undeveloped, certain forms of practical application 
grew up which have always been of great importance 



THE IDEA OF NUMBER 267 

in connection with the use of numbers. These lines of 
application consisted in measurement. Land measure- 
ment was one of the earliest forms of measurement, 
and the measurement of values involved in primitive 
barter early needed the assistance of number. In- 
deed, so intimate has been the relation between number 
and its application in measurement that some recent 
writers ^ on the subject of number have urged upon us 
as teachers the importance of recognizing this relation 
as the fundamental basis for our teaching of arithmetic. 
We even have text-books prepared to illustrate how 
number may be taught through its applications to 
measurements. 

It is interesting to note in connection with this re- 
cent urgency for a measurement-arithmetic that the 
greatest measurers and the greatest geometricians among 
the early nations, did not, as a matter of fact, have a 
very highly developed science of number. The period 
of Euclid, that master from whose work we still borrow 
in our school text-books on geometry, was not a period 
of profound knowledge of arithmetic. 

For our arithmetic and for those sciences which 
deal with number, we have to wait until the dawning 
of the modern period. In the early beginnings of the 
Eenaissance, that period of the revival of intellec- 
tual life in Europe, we borrowed from the Arabian 
scholars, probably from the Moors in Spain, the sys- 
tem of numerals which we call even to-day the Ara- 
bic numerals. With the arrival of these numerals the 
history of mathematical sciences enters upon a new 

1 McLellan and Dewey, The Psychology of Number. 



208 GENETIC PSYCHOLOGY FOR TEACHERS 

period. And the interesting fact about the Arabic 
numerals is tliat their value consists, not in their more 
immediate applicability to measurement, but rather in 
the presence of certain characteristics which favor the 
development of easy processes of manipulating number 
relations. It was the expression of certain distinctly 
numerical relations which gave our modem arithmetic 
its start. 

You are doubtless familiar with the essential supe- 
riority of the Arabic numerals over the Eoman numer- 
als. Every value has in the Eoman numerals a sepa- 
rate symbol. In the Arabic numerals, we have a few 
symbols placed in different positions to express differ- 
ent number relations. The likeness of the Arabic sym- 
bols in various positions shows immediately that the 
possible processes or modes =of treatment are the same 
whether the symbol is in unit's place or in thousand's 
place. The simplification of numerical processes which 
results is very great, so great indeed, that all our mod- 
ern methods of manipulating number relations depend 
upon this essential fact. Thus, to take a concrete illus- 
tration, suppose we represent five hundred fifty five 
by Eoman notation. It will be DLY, each five being 
represented by a symbol of its own. If one were going 
to multiply DVL by five it would not be obvious on the 
face of it that the numerical process is the same in the 
case of each of the three terms of the number. How 
obviously the process shows its character when, as in 
the Arabic notation we use 5 5 5. We see now that 
whether in hundred, or in ten, or in unit, place, the 
five means the same process of multiplication. 

This suggestion from the history of arithmetic 



THE IDEA OP NUMBER 209 

that there are certain purely arithmetical relations, 
seems to me to be most fruitful for the teacher to 
follow out and I shall ask you to inquire more in de- 
tail into the nature of a simple arithmetical process. 
Let us begin, as we have all along been doing, with the 
developed consciousness of the teacher. 

Take the simple process of addition, 7 -j- 5 = 12. 
In some sense or other we place seven and five as iden- 
tical with twelve. But after all, seven and five are 
recognized as not identical Avith twelve. If seven and 
five meant exactly the same thing as twelve, then there 
would be no motive for talking about them as in any 
sense distinct. So we see that our equation 7 4-5 = 12, 
comes to be an expression of identity with a recognition 
of the fact that the two sides of the equation are not 
fully identical. 

The kind of identity and difilerence which are here 
united will be obvious, I think, if we will recognize that 
twelve means one way of arranging a certain collection 
of objects, and seven and five mean another way of 
arranging these same objects. The identity consists 
in the fact that the objects dealt with all along are the 
same, and the difference appears in the mode of ar- 
ranging the same objects. Let us try to express this 
equation 7 -f- 5 = 13 in other terms. We may do so 
as follows : here are certain objects, we may arrange 
them in two unlike groups, or we may put them all 
together in one group. Or again, we may say, here 
are certain objects which are in two small unlike groups, 
let us put them into a single group when we shall have 
exactly the same objects, but a different arrangement. 
It makes no difference for our thought whether these 



270 GENETIC PSYCHOLOGY FOR TEACHERS 

processes of varying arrangement are actually carried 
out or not. The important consideration is that we 
shall think all the objects together in one case and in 
another case we shall think of them as not altogether^ 
but in two separate groups. 

This idea that number equations express different 
modes of grouping, can be carried also into the exam- 
ination of any single number. Take five, what does it 
mean ? It means that we have for some reason thought 
of one, and one, and one, and so on up to five, as be- 
longing together. It makes no difference whether the 
things are actually together or not, we may think of 
them as together. Every time we count up a series of. 
objects we put them together in a group. This appears 
in an interesting way if we inquire into the meaning 
of the word five as we use it in counting. We arrive 
at a certain object and say five. Our attention is 
chiefly on the object, but it is also in some measure 
on the objects which have gone before, for the word 
five refers, not only to this object at which we are now 
looking, but also to the whole group up to this point. 
Indeed, so strong is the group idea in the word five 
that we have in our modern language developed a 
Avord with which to designate more specifically the po- 
sition of the object in the group. We call this de- 
rived word an ordinal numeral and we speak of the 
fifth object. 

Follow out the line of discussion in any direction 
you please and you always come upon this same funda- 
mental fact, that numbers express modes of grouping 
objects. Thus, take the process of subtraction as ex- 
pressed in the equation 12—7 = 5. The fundamental 



THE IDEA OP NUMBER 271 

operation of grouping is here approached from a some- 
what different point of view than that adopted in the 
equation of addition. This equation of subtraction 
calls attention to the fact that given a group of twelve 
objects, we may break tlie given group into two lesser 
groups, one of which is specified as seven. After seven 
are withdrawn from the larger group of twelve, a 
group of five still remains. 

We all know how far this process of regrouping 
seen in subtraction may be carried out as a merely 
ideal process, in the fact that we ultimately come 
to apply the process of subtraction to cases where it 
involves us in curious complexities. Thus, suppose 
we have seven objects and some one demands of us 
that we give up a group of twelve. This is essentially 
a process of subtraction. 7 — 12 is the way in which 
the process is to be expressed. Now as a matter of 
actual transaction 7 — 12 is an absurd demand. As a 
matter of thought, on the other hand, it is quite rea- 
sonable. Given seven things with a demand that we 
produce twelve, we see at once that there is a deficit 
to be made up somewhere else. We ascertain the 
amount of the deficit which is five, and we indicate the 
amount by using the ordinary numeral 5, and we mark 
it as a deficit by giving it the sign which shows that 
it is to be withdrawn from somewhere else. The re- 
sult of all this thought is that we say 7— 12= — 5. 
This negative quantity expresses something that does 
not exist as a reality, but is demanded in thought. For 
our thought about processes it is a perfectly clear con- 
clusion. 

It will be seen that the processes of addition and 



272 GENETIC PSYCnOLOGY FOR TEACHERS 

subtraction are, according to this explanation, nothing 
but different phases of the general process of group- 
ing. Addition means building up larger groups from 
smaller. Subtraction means breaking up larger groups 
into smaller. Both addition and subtraction belong 
to the fundamental process of making up groups. 

When we come to multiplication and division we 
have modifications of the process of grouping. The 
natural step to these processes of multiplication and 
division is not through multiplication, but through di- 
vision. I believe that we shall come to recognize this 
some day in our school practise. Be that as it may, 
the kind of grouping present in both division and mul- 
tiplication is to be defined by saying that the smaller 
groups involved in these processes are always equal to 
each other. Thus, when we subtract seven from twelve 
and get five, there is nothing about the two smaller 
groups seven and five, to lead us to compare them, ex- 
cept the general fact that they are unequal. But divide 
twelve into six and six, and the process proves to be 
an especially interesting case of subtraction. Here is 
a case of subtraction in which the two lesser groups 
are equal. Division is therefore a special case of sub- 
traction. The character of the groups obtained by 
division into equal groups, leads to our development 
of a genuinely new mode of thought. When the groups 
are alike we begin to count the equal groups as single 
wholes, thus treating each group as a unit of higher 
order. Thus, when we say there are two sixes in twelve, 
we have said there are in twelve two units of higher 
order. If you ask what makes up each of these units 
of higher order, we answer six units of the lower order. 



THE IDEA OF NUMBER 273 

Division and multiplication thus come to be processes 
dealing with units of higher order. 

There is another way of getting at this truth about 
division and multiplication. We all know how inti- 
mately the processes of multiplication and division are 
connected with the general fact that our whole system 
of notation is a decimal system. One can multiply by 
tens without any difficulty. Multiplying or dividing 
by ten is just like counting. Did you ever realize that 
this is due to the fact that ten is, in both counting and 
multiplying, a standard unit of higher order? 

Think of the matter in tliis way. You are con- 
fronted with a large group of objects, say a hundred or 
more. The group is so large that you can not manage 
it well as a whole, and the individuals are so numerous 
that you can not treat them satisfactorily as individ- 
uals. What do you do ? You do the most natural thing 
in the world, you break up the unwieldy whole into cer- 
tain groups that can be managed. From the earliest 
times men have divided up armies, and cattle, and 
lands, on just this principle. Each smaller group is 
then treated as a unity of higher order. Thus, the 
small companies of the army were all given a respon- 
sible commander. He represented the unity of the 
whole group. Rations were given to him for the whole 
group. We have carried this same idea of dividing into 
companies into our counting. When we have a mass of 
objects we count one, two, and so on up to ten, and then 
we stop. We set aside that ten as a manageable group, 
as a unity of higher order, and then begin again. 

The fact that ten is a unity of higher order, is ex- 
pressed in the very fact that we label it with the same 
18 



274 GENETIC PSYCHOLOGY FOR TEACHERS 

symbol as that which we use for the lower unities. We 
merely mark the higher order of the decimal group by 
giving to the digit when it expresses a unity of higher 
order a higher position. 

When now, having arranged our great mass of ob- 
jects into tens, we begin to count by tens, we do exactly 
what is done in every process of multiplication and 
division. We treat small equal groups as unities of 
higher order. That is what makes multiplying by 
tens so easy. The reason why multiplying by threes 
or fours or other numbers than ten is not so easy, is, 
that having adopted a standard group of ten for our 
whole notation, everything else has to be turned into 
terms of this standard notation. The ordinary multi- 
plication is therefore, a double process; it is treating 
small equal groups as unities of a higher order, and 
then turning the results into terms of our standard 
decimal notation. 

Without attempting to carry the discussion into any 
further detail, we may conclude that there is such a 
thing as the science of grouping. The objects which 
are grouped, are not centers of attention in this 
science, but rather the different ways in which the 
grouping may be carried out, no matter what the objects 
are. That two groups, one of seven and one of five 
may be made out of a single group of twelve, is a fun- 
damental fact of the science of grouping. This is not 
a fact of nature-study or history or literature, it is a 
fact that deserves to have independent recognition. It 
is a fact of the science of number. 

I have no patience with the efforts being made in 
so many departments of our education to swallow up 



THE IDEA OP NUMBER 275 

such subjects as arithmetic into some other subject. 
By no means in the world can the fact that 7 -|- 5 
= 12, be taught except through a definite and well- 
ordered directing of the attention to a fact of group- 
ing. It makes no difference how much you decorate the 
fact with outside frills, the fact will have to come out 
sharply and clearly as a fact of importance in its own 
right. 

One of the sad results of our present-day efforts to 
evade arithmetic is that we get neither the other sub- 
jects we seek to reach nor the arithmetic. I once saw 
a teacher in one of the most widely known experimental 
schools in the country, illustrate very clearly the mis- 
take here referred to. She was teaching a beginning 
class in social relations and was " incidentally " teach- 
ing number. For her own thinking the number ex- 
pressions and processes were obviously the most impor- 
tant facts involved. So absorbed was she in number 
that she allowed a youthful storekeeper to sell a large 
well-bound book for ten cents and an unbound pam- 
phlet for seventy-six cents. She then allowed the pupil 
who next in order of rotation became storekeeper, to 
buy back the ten-cent book at the ruinous price of sixty 
cents. In short, she forgot entirely the commercial 
relations; and the children, not being controlled by 
any deep-seated motives of either commerce or arith- 
metic, lost all the instruction that might have come 
from an intelligent pursuit of either of the relations 
alone. 

Another difficulty with our teaching of arithmetic 
when we fail to recognize the fact that arithmetic is 
a science of grouping, is that we take up a whole series 



276 GENETIC PSYCHOLOGY FOR TEACHERS 

of subjects in arithmetic and think we have treated 
them adequately in arithmetic, when, as a matter of fact, 
they, as well as the science of grouping, ought to have 
independent treatment. For example, most of us learn 
the greater part of what we know about spatial relations, 
not from the spatial values themselves, but through the 
abstract numerical expressions of these values. The 
result is that we are deplorably deficient in ability to 
think in terms of real spatial relations. We can talk 
very glibly in number terms of ten feet and half a mile, 
but we do not think these values in spatial terms at 
all. Even smaller distances, such as eight inches and 
five centimeters, have little concrete meaning for the 
ordinary mind. Systems of form-study are fortunately 
being worked out to correct this defect in our educa- 
tional system. But form-study is distinct and different 
in its motives from number work. The two must not be 
identified. Note that it is not for a moment asserted 
that the two kinds of study may not be advantageously 
com.bined at certain stages. But it is asserted that 
spatial relations are not identical with number rela- 
tions and must not be confounded with them. 

I agree heartily with Mr. Speer in his criticism of 
the blind mixture which we make of number and 
measuring. He writes in his Primary Arithmetic ^ as 
follows : " Place a measure in the hands of a pupil and 
set him to marking off spaces on this or that, and 
counting them before he is ready for such work, before 
anything has been done to induce the habit of looking 
from one magnitude to another, and you absorb him 

1 Page 9. 



THE IDEA OF NUMBER 277 

in a mechanical process which turns the thought from 
the relational element with which mathematics deals. 
He may write, ' the door is eight feet high/ when he 
has simply counted eight spaces. But he has made no 
mathematical comparison, observed no relation, done 
little which develops power to think." 

I should be willing to subscribe to an extension of 
this criticism over most of the departments of our 
arithmetic. The great trouble in teaching percentage 
or fractions, or other departments of arithmetic, is that 
we are doing two things at once and commonly not 
doing either one fully. We are trying to teach certain 
practical relations of life such as business relations, 
and we are at the same time trying to teach number 
relations. We do not seem to realize that the number 
relations are not identical with the business relations. 
We do not seem to understand that a problem in inter- 
est, for example, involves a human relation which is 
not arithmetical at all. As a matter of fact, I doubt 
very much whether the majority of our children have 
the vaguest notion of what the meaning of interest 
on money really is. They always think of interest as a 
problem in number. 

What I have said about the difference between num- 
ber relations and spatial and business relations can be 
emphasized, I think, by calling attention to the fact 
that there are ways of dealing with spatial and busi- 
ness relations that do not involve any number. For 
suitable examples, we shall, of course, have to appeal 
to cases in which training has been of a different type 
from our own. Such examples are numerous, however. 
Take any savage who has not had a course in number. 



278 GENETIC PSYCHOLOGY FOR TEACHERS 

but has had a very thorough course in spatial relations. 
He can shoot his arroAV or throw his spear with a nicety 
of spatial estimation that surpasses a hundredfold his 
ability to count. He knows at a glance whether an 
object can be reached sooner or later than another 
object. He knows how much higher the highest rock 
is than the one below. But he never translates any of 
his knowledge into number. His number relations lag 
far behind his spatial ideas. Now note that this does 
not show for a moment that spatial apprehension should 
always precede number expressions in individual de- 
velopment, it merely shows that spatial ideas have a 
reality and value which is peculiar to themselves. They 
are spatial quantities, not numerical quantities. The 
use of number in connection with these spatial quanti- 
ties as we teach it in our schools, is not necessary, it is 
not universal, it is not a sufficient justification for the 
confusion of the two which usually takes place. 

Again take the relations treated in that part of our 
arithmetic which usually deals with buying and selling. 
We are constantly buying things in practical life, that 
is, in technical language, we are securing goods of vari- 
ous kinds in exchange for the precious metals. In 
such transactions we use number calculations so con- 
stantly that we have come to look upon the buying 
process in our school treatment of it as entirely mathe- 
matical in character. But there is an important dis- 
tinction to be made between the number expressions 
used in buying, and the end for which the number ex- 
pressions are employed. The real relation involved is 
one of relative desirability of the goods in the eyes of 
the various parties to the transaction. That is, the 



THE IDEA OF NUMBER 279 

real relation in commerce is illustrated in its simplest 
and purest form in the barter of the savage. He has 
one commodity and wants another, so he makes an ex- 
change. Some day his descendants will use gold and 
silver and they will state their desires in terms of 
figures, but their essential act in buying will continue 
to be one of exchange. 

This fact that the number idea is not identical with 
spatial ideas or with ideas of value, but is equally ap- 
plicable to these different spheres of quantity, is what 
makes the number idea an abstraction. There is a 
good deal of vagueness in many minds about the mean- 
ing of the word abstract. We recognize in a general 
way that number is highly abstract, but do not know ex- 
actly what this highly abstract character consists in. 
Let us see if we can make the matter clear. 

We have a certain group of objects lying before us; 
to be definite, let us assume that we have twelve coins. 
We may make a great many different kinds of real 
groups out of these twelve coins. For example, we can, 
if we wish, hold 5 in one hand and 7 in the other. 
Such a division of our twelve coins into two groups is 
a real division, or as we say, a concrete division. There 
is nothing abstract about such a process. 

Now take the first step toward abstraction. Let the 
twelve coins lie together on the table, and with your 
eye draw a purely imaginary line through the group 
of twelve, dividing it into two groups, one of seven and 
one of five. Here the objects are concrete as before, 
but the division is a purely ideal division, real only for 
the thinking individual. This possibility of making 
purely ideal rearrangements of the objects about us 



280 GENETIC PSYCHOLOGY FOR TEACHERS 

is one of the first steps in the growing independence of 
our thought. We begin to realize the fact that there 
is a difference between objects and our mode of ar- 
ranging them. We begin to see that we are the really 
important factors in the process of arranging. We can 
think of a certain arrangement whether it is actually 
carried out or not. 

This fact that the mode of arrangement belongs to 
ourselves rather than to the objects may be made clearer 
in this way. Suppose I begin pointing to the various 
coins in my pile of twelve. I point first with my right 
index-finger and keep pointing with this finger until I 
have tallied off five of the coins. I can now turn 
about and point to the other seven with my left index- 
finger. I had a series of activities arranged in two 
distinct groups, one of five and one of seven, and the 
coins were in no way disturbed by the classification 
which I introduced by dividing them into right-hand 
coins and left-hand coins. The process of arrangement 
was my own. I tallied off the coins as I pleased. It 
may be that the coins were not mine or were quite be- 
yond my power, but the arrangement was fully in my 
control. If I please I can at another time, point to 
nine with my right index-finger and to three with my 
left. Or I can point to all twelve with either right or 
left finger. 

This is the first step in the process of abstraction, 
to realize that the mode of arranging objects is quite 
independent of any concrete redistribution of the ob- 
jects themselves. There is no reason, for example, 
why we should not point with our left finger to all of 
the desks in the schoolroom and then point to all the 



THE IDEA OF NUMBER 281 

window-panes with our right finger. And there is no 
reason, on the other hand, why we should not point to 
both desks and window-panes with the same hand. The 
notion that number depends on some kind of uniform- 
ity in objects is all false. Some writers tell us that 
only like things can be counted together. This is. sheer 
nonsense. We can count anything we like together. 
We are the ones who do the counting. Counting is an 
individual process. We can control it without refer- 
ence to outside difficulties of arrangement. When the 
process is developed in its higher forms, abstraction, 
or freedom from particular objects outside of our- 
selves, becomes complete. 

I have used the illustration of pointing so as to 
get some definite and obvious form of personal activity. 
Of course, we can count without pointing, and we can 
distinguish groups without using the right and left 
sides. The division is easy enough when we are trained 
in counting, because we have different actions of the 
vocal cords for each individual object we count. We 
have already seen in our discussion of reading that 
word ideas always arouse certain activities in the vocal 
cords. This involuntary expression accompanying 
thought processes is nowhere more strikingly mani- 
fested than during counting. Each new object which 
we include in this or that group, is literally pointed 
out, not by a finger movement, but by a distinct re- 
sponse of the vocal cords. Thus, we see the truth 
that number arrangement is a process of individual 
activity, confirmed in a very literal sense. Even in its 
most abstract forms, number is related to individual 
activity. 



282 GENETIC PSYCHOLOGY FOR TEACHERS 

We have said that the individual after acquiring 
this ability to use abstract number classifications may 
apply them as he likes. There is, however, one limita- 
tion to the free manipulation of his rearrangings, which 
we must notice. The individual is not at liberty to be 
inconsistent with himself. For example, I can not ar- 
range a certain series of objects in my thought and call 
that series five to-day, and to-morrow call the same 
series eleven. To put the matter in another form, I 
can not point in a certain way to-day and in a totally 
different way to-morrow, and then treat the two cases 
of pointing as if they were the same. If I do I shall 
get into trouble. I shall find that inconsistency will 
be my undoing. The one thing that I must learn about 
this mode of arrangement which I cultivate is that it 
will be necessary for me to be consistent. 

Some of the means by which the race has slowly 
worked out a series of helps to consistency are obvious. 
For example, suppose that instead of pointing time and 
time again with the indcx-fingcr — a form of movement 
which might easily lead to confusion and inconsistency 
— we point successively with thumb, index-finger, mid- 
dle finger, and so on. Then we should be able to mark 
a given stage in the process of counting by the part 
of the hand that has been covered. This is exactly the 
sort of counting process which we see developed into 
written form in the Eoman numerals. Again, when 
it comes to using activities of the vocal cords instead 
of finger movements, consistency is secured by devel- 
oping a certain fixed order of vocal cord movements. 
The fixed order is learned and adhered to whatever 
the subjects of the arranging activity may be. The 



THE IDEA OF NUMBER 283 

children of a developed race have the advantage of 
racial experience in this matter, for they find a fixed 
order of vocal cord movements all prepared in the 
racial series of names for numerals. 

More important even than consistency in the count- 
ing of relatively simple groups, is the development of 
the power to be consistent in the combining of these 
groups in various ways. Suppose that we have a group 
of three and a group of four, we may rearrange these 
two groups in a variety of ways. But in all of the re- 
arrangements we must be consistent with the first 
grouping into three and four. This may be expressed 
by saying that whatever we do with these two groups, 
we must always be able to come back to the original 
groups instantly and without contradicting ourselves. 
This necessity of always being able to return to the 
original form, leads us to study the rules of consistent 
arrangement. Anything that is consistent with a re- 
turn to the original grouping is permissible in our 
handling of three and four. The study of what is per- 
missible or consistent is the study of number relations. 
Do you not see that when I say 3 plus 4 equal 7, equal 
6 plus 2, equal 6 plus 1, equal 4 plus 3, and so on, I 
am merely working out all the various consistent state- 
ments that can be made about three and four? 

There is no difficulty in understanding now why 
the science of mathematics is so closely related to what 
we call logic. Logic is the science which studies the 
modes of consistent reasoning in all departments of 
thought, and mathematics deals with consistent modes 
of dealing with group relations. The reason why we 
have to have a science of number is that it takes much 



284 GENETIC PSYCHOLOGY FOR TEACHERS 

investigation in many directions to make sure that our 
modes of ideal regrouping are really consistent. It 
would be uneconomical for every individual to seek 
out all the different consistent forms of number ar- 
rangement, so the race has recorded what it knows 
about various modes of consistent reasoning, in the 
science of number relations, and the individual gets the 
benefit of all this accumulated experience. 

Let us now ask ourselves, on the basis of our study 
of arithmetic as the science of groups, what the process 
is when we work out a practical problem by the aid of 
our mathematical principles. The practical problem 
presents to us certain facts arranged in certain relations 
with respect to each other. Our first step is to under- 
stand the given arrangement of the facts, and the sec- 
ond step is to express these relations in terms of our 
number system. This second step is not always easy, 
when the relations are complex, but upon its accuracy 
and completeness depend all the later steps of the oper- 
ation. It is just at this point that there arises one of 
the great difficulties which our pupils have with the 
complex problems we give them in arithmetic. They 
frequently do not understand the nature of given rela- 
tions and they do not know how to formulate the 
problem in terms of the number system. When such 
difficulties arise in the very first stages of an example, 
where is the remedy to be sought ? In a more thorough 
comprehension of number relations pure and simple? 
Certainly not. If the pupil has difficulty in under- 
standing the problem in its first stages, what he needs 
is some explanation of the real facts involved. He 
should understand the situation first in its ordinary 



THE IDEA OP NUMBER 285 

terms. Then he should have some training in the 
means of expressing these real situations in terms of 
the purely numerical relations. 

After the second step of intelligent statement of the 
problem in terms of number, the rest of the process 
falls within the domain of the science of number rela- 
tions. We know through this science how to rear- 
range and manipulate the relations, always keeping 
ourselves consistent with the original facts. These 
manipulations do not affect the real facts one way 
or the other. They simply show us what would re- 
sult if the relations were consistently rearranged. It 
does not make any difference what the facts are after 
they are once translated into the number expressions, 
from that time on we are interested only in the con- 
sistent rearrangement of the relations with which we 
started. 

It is quite possible to start with relations that are 
entirely preposterous so far as the real world is con- 
cerned. One may start, for example, with ten houses 
costing fifty cents each. It makes no difference so far 
as the consistency of the process is concerned whether 
one can or can not reasonably make the assertion with 
which he starts. But from the point of view of intel- 
ligent education it is a mistake to misrepresent the real 
relations even where we might neglect them without 
danger to our science of number. The science of num- 
ber as such may not suffer, but the pupil's notion of 
what an application is, certainly suffers. The number 
process may be the same when based on an absurd 
proposition as when based on a reasonable assumption, 
but there is always a loss in the character of any men- 



286 GENETIC PSYCHOLOGY FOR TEACHERS 

tal process when it contains an absurd element, even 
tliongh that element is of secondary importance for the 
study of number relations. 

The significance of this stateriient which we have 
just been making, that the best education can never be 
obtained by starting with absurd propositions, is wider 
than most of us imagine. Do you ever realize how ab- 
surd it is to tell a child to suppose that he has a thou- 
sand dollars in the bank? Most of us would have to 
tliink two or three times to rise to any very vivid reali- 
zation of such a state of affairs in our own mature 
minds. To the child it is no real application of arith- 
metic to life to give him such a proposition. We mis- 
take if we think that there is anything enlivening in 
such a proposition. As a matter of fact the mind 
simply passes as rapidly and as fully as possible over 
the absurd proposition and gets at the number process 
involved. The children soon get used to accepting 
absurdities without much thought about them, and our 
whole science of number gets to be a kind of vague 
mixture of more or less remote and senseless proposi- 
tions and half-understood number rules. Through this 
maze the children are carried, wondering now and then 
that numbers seem to fit each other so well, and won- 
dering somewhat less frequently that men in the arith- 
metics live such fanciful lives. But worst of all, losing 
all the time, what they should be gaining, an idea of the 
real utility of their science. 

It is not to be wondered at that we feel sometimes 
the inadequacy of our number work. It is not to be 
wondered at that business men and practical men con- 
demn our methods in the school. The trouble with us 



* THE IDEA OF NUMBER 287 

is that we have no clear notion of what we are doing, 
or of the end at which we are aiming. 

And now I suppose you are prepared to ask how all 
this discussion is to be turned into practical school work. 
I am tempted to make short work of your question by 
saying that it is your business and not mine to turn this 
into practical school work. I believe I should be justi- 
fied in disposing of the matter in that way. Indeed, I 
can think of nothing which would be more opposed to 
the whole spirit of my discussion, than for me to formu- 
late for you a fixed system of arithmetic teaching. 
Arithmetical knowledge does not consist in a series of 
rules or examples. It consists rather in a growing com- 
prehension of the consistent methods of treating num- 
ber relations, whenever and wherever these number re- 
lations appear. If that sort of knowledge is to be 
taught to children, there must be a living teacher who 
can help the child with his special difficulties. The 
child's difficulties do not appear in accordance with any 
fixed system that was ever written. The teacher who 
does nothing but follow some set system is not going 
to succeed in helping children where they need help 
most, and when they need it most. 

There is another reason why I shall not take it upon 
myself to lay down any new system of arithmetic teach- 
ing. If the analysis of the number idea which we have 
been working out is valid, if it agrees with your own 
study of the mature number ideas which you find in 
your own minds, then the principles of teaching to which 
we shall be lead by this analysis are applicable to all the 
existing systems of teaching arithmetic. When you 
find a man who has to change the whole system of educa- 



288 GENETIC PSYCHOLOGY FOR TEACHERS 

tion in order to fit some of his ideas, beware of that 
man. No man can impeach a nation. No man can 
impeach our schools. They are the products of cen- 
turies of development, they represent something vastly 
broader than the individual. There is something worth 
retaining in every system of teaching that has been fol- 
lowed in the schools. And so now we may say that 
whatever system of arithmetic you teach, you can teach 
it more intelligently and with better results, if you will 
make yourselves intelligently familiar with the funda- 
mental nature of the number idea. Indeed, we may 
boldly venture the assertion that it is only through such 
a clear understanding of the nature of the number 
idea that you can teach arithmetic in any other than a 
blind non-rational fashion. 

Such practical suggestions as I have to make, there- 
fore, are intended to fit the system which you teach, 
whatever that system may be. The first suggestion is 
that in teaching arithmetic you should never lose sight 
of the main purpose which is to give instruction in 
number relations. Do not let this chief purpose be- 
come obscured through your interest in the illustrative 
examples which you may have occasion to use. Do not 
fail to keep in mind the fact that the examples are 
examples, and not the chief subjects of attention. 

You have heard some of those tedious talkers who 
begin to give you an account of something and are dis- 
tracted from the line of their narrative by a hint which 
comes up in the course of their talk. They lose the 
point of the story and they lose the advantage of the 
secondary line of discussion as well. The same thing 
is true of the sort of false correlation which we some- 



THE IDEA OF NUMBER 289 

times see practised in arithmetic. The lesson starts 
out bravely as a lesson in arithmetic, but it gets con- 
fused by its own illustrations, and at the end of the 
period it is neither arithmetic or anything else. 

The only true principle of correlation is to have 
one main line of interest at a given time and cluster 
examples about that main line, never for a moment 
allowing the chief consideration to be lost sight of. 
At some stages of school work the only way in which it 
is possible to maintain such a clearly defined line of 
thought and work is to give relatively little in the way 
of distracting illustrative thought to be mastered. In 
the early grades of school it is not well in a single day 
of school work to approach the same object from too 
many points of view. Let the children have a fair 
•opportunity to become acquainted with one aspect of 
a situation before you thrust another upon them. If 
it is an example in arithmetic, the objects should be 
simple, and should be chosen for their availability to 
illustrate as simply as possible the facts of number 
relation. 

We shall never economize time in our school pro- 
grams if we fail to recognize this fundamental prin- 
ciple of arrangement, that certain lines of instruction 
have at times the right of way. It is only by arranging 
arithmetic with reference to the demands of arithmetic, 
that we shall ever get over that subject completely. 
How long do you suppose one would have to wait be- 
fore all the possible number relations came up " inci- 
dentally " in connection with a course in manual train- 
ing? Almost indefinitely. If we want our arithmetic 
to be in any sense of the word complete, we shall have 
19 



290 GENETIC PSYCHOLOGY FOR TEACHERS 

to force examples into the course at times for no pur- 
pose other than to give a complete view of number re- 
lations. The teacher who does not recognize the right 
of arithmetic to be taught as the main line of considera- 
tion^ and to be taught at times in a forced way, is sim- 
ply turning back from the rationalized order of school 
training to the purely accidental order of the natural 
environment. 

Of course a child can get training by the purely in- 
cidental method, but it is like the training of the savage. 
Such training is never complete. The training of the 
street gamin is also of this type and it is never com- 
plete. Within the limits of their natural experience, 
savage and street gamin may be ever so acute, but their 
unsystematic training has never prepared them in an 
all-round way for a full, broad grasp of any subject. A 
full, broad grasp can come only from taking up sooner 
or later a systematic, rather than the purely natural, 
order of study. Our arithmetic of to-day is suffering 
in some quarters from a giving up of the idea of com- 
pleteness. We are too often satisfied to deal with those 
number relations which appear incidentally rather than 
with all the number relations in their completeness. 

There is, of course, a sort of seeking after immedi- 
ate completeness which is absurd. The old Grube 
method which aimed to treat every possible phase of a 
single number before passing on to the next, was mis- 
taken in its devotion to such immediate completeness. 
Completeness does not mean that the child shall go 
through a subject at one sitting, or in the absolutely 
logical order. Let the order be flexible so far as it can 
be, but let the teacher be ever aware of the need of 



THE IDEA OF NUMBER 291 

making this flexible order ultimately complete. If the 
teacher will hold the situation clearly in mind and will 
resolutely set out to make the work in arithmetic lead 
to completeness of training in number relations, the 
path to that completeness may be varied by this or that 
reasonable bending. The warning which we need these 
days is not to get out of sight of the main line of train- 
ing. Do not forget that there is a body of number re- 
lations and that these are worth teaching. 

The second suggestion which I have to make is one 
which I realize is out of harmony with some of the 
seemingly general tendencies of the times. But I shall 
nevertheless venture the suggestion, and you shall judge 
of its soundness. If it be true that the race has found 
it advantageous to establish certain fixed orders of 
counting; and if it be true that the race has spent a 
great deal of time in discovering certain series of con- 
sistent relations; and if it be true that the children need 
to have these series of established relations firmly fixed 
in mind — then there is nothing which we as teachers 
can do to make a royal road to all these possessions which 
the race offers the child. The child must exert him- 
self to acquire these fixed orders and these discovered 
consistencies. The child must be drilled into line and 
must learn to march according to the rules of the army. 
If he is not drilled, he may learn how to straggle along 
by himself, but he will never get the full advantage of 
his social inheritance. All this means that some of 
the facts of the science of number have to be made 
automatic by diligent and long-continued practise. We 
shall have to give up our bright dream that the hard 
ways of school life can be made easy. These ways may 



292 GENETIC PSYCHOLOGY FOR TEACHERS 

be made less difficult perhaps by judicious preparation 
and by careful subdivisions of the task to be completed. 
But the work of learning consistent number relations 
as tliey appear in the multiplication table, for example, 
can never be escaped. 

The third suggestion which I have to make is that 
the teacher will never find a better opportunity to culti- 
vate the power of abstraction or to study the develop- 
ment of that power than in the teaching of arithmetic. 
Like all abstract thought, arithmetical thought must 
be based upon concrete experiences. We can not ex- 
pect the children to acquire the control of highly 
abstract modes of thought suddenly. There must be a 
gradual detaching of the process of thought from the 
particular objects to which the thought is applied. We 
have been working at this problem in the past without 
recognizing always just what we were doing. Our 
method has been to apply a given process of number 
manipulation first to one concrete situation and then to 
another, depending on the child's mind to arrive ulti- 
mately at a kind of general mode of thought. We have 
too seldom directed the attention of our pupils to the 
processes themselves. This can be done, however, very 
successfully, even at an early age. Thus, one can lay a 
group of blocks before children in even the first year 
and ask them to think how they could divide them into 
groups without actually making the division. Then 
one can go a step further and ask the children to close 
their eyes and think how they would divide the blocks. 
To be sure, this is not a very high degree of abstraction, 
but it is abstraction begun. I think the true value of 
the Speer method is not in what Mr. Speer calls the 



THE IDEA OF NUMBER 293 

ratio idea, so much as in the fact that the children have 
to think divisions into the blocks where there are in 
reality no divisions. Whenever you teach a child 
to think a division where there is no division, you have 
taken a step in the direction of cultivating his power of 
abstraction. 

The training in abstraction must not stop at these 
early stages. A form of number manipulation which is 
sufficiently freed from the objects to be transferred to 
the fingers, is not yet fully developed, as we all know 
from our recognition of the evils of the counting-on- 
the-fingers method. I^or is abstraction complete when 
every problem of number relations has to be thought 
out in terms of any concrete objects other than the fin- 
gers, as for example, blocks. The watchful teacher who 
uses the Speer method, knows that the time comes when 
the next step in abstraction means the freeing of the 
children from even the blocks. The number processes 
must stand out by themselves. This is what accounts 
for the pause in the development of children trained 
by any of the concrete methods. They come to a cer- 
tain stage of development where abstraction is neces- 
sary for further progress and then the inevitable men- 
tal struggle has to be made to pass on to the higher 
processes. 

If some teacher would make it his special study to 
find out how children can be assisted in cultivating the 
power of abstraction, he would perform a great service 
for the science and practise of education. There have 
been a good many theories of abstract thought in 
psychology and none of them seem very helpful to the 
teacher, and about all that we do now in a practical way 



294: GENETIC PSYCHOLOGY FOR TEACHERS 

seems to consist in keeping children at various examples 
and in waiting for the abstraction to work itself out. 
Perhaps we may learn some day how to call the attention 
of the children more to the process itself. For ex- 
ample, I think even in such advanced problems as in- 
terest, we might advantageously take a little time to 
show the children that the fundamental combination of 
processes is the same whether tlie base and rate be given, 
or the base and interest. At the more elementary 
stages of the study, we should similarly make a distinc- 
tion between the concrete factors and the fundamental 
relations. One method is that which I described a 
moment ago of thinking out divisions without actually 
making them. But in any case, abstraction is not easy 
for the children, and we must make some effort to help 
them in carrying it out. Let us see if we can not 
gather some new observations on this subject so that we 
may do more than throw the children blindly on their 
own resources in this difficult matter. 

We must close this discussion of arithmetic with 
these general suggestions. They are all of one type. 
They all center about the fundamental pedagogical prin- 
ciple which it has been our aim to illustrate in each of 
our discussions. That fundamental pedagogical prin- 
ciple is that the teacher should first understand the 
inner nature of his own mental processes and seek in his 
own understanding of these processes the methods of 
teaching. It is futile to study children unless we under- 
take the kind of study which the biologists call com- 
parative study. Comparative study consists in taking 
various specimens illustrating different stages of devel- 
opment, and comparing them so as to find out their 



THE IDEA OP NUMBER 295 

likenesses and unlikenesses. This discovery of the like- 
nesses and unlikenesses, gives the only true basis for an 
understanding of the process of development. A study 
of child life without an application of the comparative 
method is a veritable groping in the dark. It has no 
sure footing and it has no definite outcome. It has no 
sure footing, for we do not know whether or not ex- 
ternal expressions of the child mean what our exter- 
nal expressions mean. It has no definite outcome, 
for our study of children can never be undertaken 
with a view to keeping children at their present level. 
We want to elevate and develop them. And before 
we can answer the question of what we want to ele- 
vate them into and develop them into, we must study 
the higher as well as the lower stages of mental de- 
velopment. 

There is a passage in Wundt's Outlines of Psychology 
which I shall quote to you in closing, for it states the 
case with all clearness and with the high authority of 
one who is undoubtedly one of the leaders of scientific 
thought in our day. Wundt writes : ^ " For these rea- 
sons it is an error to hold, as is sometimes held, that 
the mental life of adults can never be fully understood 
except through the analysis of the child's mind. The 
exact opposite is the true position to take. Since in the 
investigation of children and of savages, only objective 
symptoms are in general available, any psychological in- 
terpretation of these symptoms is possible only on the 
basis of mature adult introspection which has been 
carried out under experimental conditions. For the 

^ Outlines of Psychology, second English edition, p. 330. 



296 GENETIC PSYCHOLOGY FOR TEACHERS 

same reasons, it is only the results of observations of 
children and savages which have been subjected to a 
similar psychological analysis, which furnish any proper 
basis for conclusions in regard to the nature of mental 
development in general." 



CHAPTER X 

SOME LIMITATIONS OF OUE NATUEE 

In this last chapter I shall bring together several 
miscellaneous topics which should be included in our 
teacher-study, and shall also review briefly the ground 
which has been covered in the earlier chapters. Our 
present task is to gather up the loose ends and main 
lines of our thought so that we may secure a general 
grasp of the nature of teacher-study and may carry away 
some clearer recognition, I hope, of the importance of 
continuing this study in every-day class-room work. 

For want of a better title for these miscellaneous 
topics I have called them all, discussions of the limita- 
tions of our nature. That may sound like a rather dis- 
couraging subject with which to close what has aimed 
to be throughout an optimistic view of school life; and 
it would be a discouraging subject if there were not 
means of bridging over these limitations. I believe 
there are such means, and that is why I shall call your 
attention to these particular limitations. If there are 
other limitations of which any of us are conscious and 
for which no means of correction are in view, let us 
consider them in secret. In public we shall think only 
of these limitations which can be overcome. 

The first limitations of the teacher's nature which 

297 



298 GENETIC PSYCHOLOGY FOR TEACHERS 

are important for our consideration are those which 
grow out of the fact that we, and all our ancestors, were 
originally made to live outdoors where the air is free, 
and the ranges of vision are long, and the light is strong 
and well distributed and shaded by the soft colors of 
nature. We are not in our natural environment when 
we find ourselves shut up in small closed spaces which 
are insufficiently ventilated and lighted, and where we 
are set about accomplishing confining tasks. 

Take for example, the means which nature has 
given us of testing the air we breathe. We call it the 
sense of smell. This sense of smell is nature's sentinel 
at the portal of our lungs. Any foul gas which should 
not pass this portal is challenged by the sentinel and a 
general alarixi is sent to headquarters. But the poor 
sentinel finds himself quite unable to cope with the 
hard tasks set for him in the schoolroom. Have you 
never come into a badly ventilated schoolroom from 
the fresh air of outdoors and noticed at once the warn- 
ings given by your sense of smell? But stay in that 
room a few minutes and the protests grow fainter and 
fainter and finally you breathe the foul air without 
any consciousness of its impurity. If you had been in 
the room from the early morning, and the air had grad- 
ually grown impure, it would have been quite impossible 
for you to notice the gradual process of deterioration. 
Nature's sentinel at the portals of the lungs is a very 
imperfect guide in the artificial rooms in which we 
live. If we lived in the open air where changes are 
of no importance unless they are sudden and marked, 
it might be different. But nature can not make a man 
suited for the outdoor conditions of life and yet have 



SOME LIMITATIONS OF OUR NATURE 299 

him suited to artificial indoor life as well. What is to 
be done in such a case? Obviously, there is only one 
course to follow. Eecognize the limitation of one's 
nature and prepare to meet it. If you can not depend 
on your sense of smell to tell yon when a room is 
filled with impure air, then adopt some other safe- 
guard quite as artificial as the room itself — get a ven- 
tilating system. 

The trouble with most of us is that we are not con- 
vinced of the limitations of our natures. It seems to be 
useless to produce statistics. That has been done time 
and time again and has proved beyond the shadow of a 
doubt that the ordinary teacher, in any schoolroom not 
provided with adequate means of ventilation, is breath- 
ing impure air and is allowing the children to breathe 
impure air. I think the most convincing argument 
which could be brought to bear on most teachers would 
be to have them go outdoors for a short recess each 
day in the winter just before school is out, and let them 
come back with their natural air-testers in condition 
to act for a short time in an artificial environment, 
and let them in this way get an individual realization of 
the air they had been breathing all da}^ 

Or turn to another illustration and note how na- 
ture was limited in the production of a natural ther- 
mometer. Suppose you felt the cold of a winter day 
as keenly all the time you were outdoors as you do 
when you first go out of a warm room. The cold of a 
winter walk would be simply excruciating. As a matter 
of fact, nature has arranged our temperature sense in 
such a way that we soon get adapted within wide limits 
to the surrounding air, and do not feel cold and warmth 



300 GENETIC PSYCHOLOGY FOR TEACHERS 

except when there is a sudden or extreme increase or 
decrease of the surrounding temperature. You do not 
feel cold on a spring day when the temperature is 60°, 
nor hot on a summer day when the air is 80°. The 
skin has adapted itself to the surrounding air. The 
scientist expresses this fact by saying that the skin has 
a fluctuating or adaptive zero. This skin zero goes up 
or down within wide limits with the atmosphere, and 
we do not notice anything but sudden change above 
or below the skin zero. The practical application of 
all this you know. The teacher forgets about the 
temperature, and his sense of temperature does not 
warn him, and the temperature gets up above 80°. The 
result is that everybody gets restless, and work does not 
seem to be easy — all because nature could not make us 
into good thermometers and at the same time fit us to 
be comfortable in the various temperatures in which 
we have to live at various times. 

Take still another limitation of our natures. Na- 
ture did not give us any sense at all with which to 
recognize changes in the amount of moisture in the air. 
Most of us never know, except in extreme cases, any- 
thing about humidity. We know it is humid when 
everything is damp, and matches will not light; and we 
know it is dry in rooms where furniture warps and 
cracks; but we do not know about the lesser changes, 
and we do not recognize any of the changes directly 
through our senses. And yet there is many a day when 
the throats and mucous linings of our pupils are suf- 
fering from the parching of the dry air of the school- 
room. Nature expected when she made animals and 
men to live out of doors that the ordinary atmosphere 



SOME LIMITATIONS OP OUR NATURE 301 

would have at least enough humidity to keep the mu- 
cous membranes from dr}dng up. Nature never pro- 
vided the proper senses to go with steam-heating plants 
or furnaces. 

When it comes to the sense of vision what havoc 
we have made with nature's plans! Many of us are 
reaping the rewards in the artificial supplements to 
nature which we wear to indicate the effects of indoor 
life on eyes. Nature ought to have attached some sort 
of a fatigue-recorder to eyes. As it is, we use our 
eyes under the most adverse conditions. We concen- 
trate the eyes on fine print. We try to see in dark 
corners for which only owl's eyes are made in nature's 
scheme. We sit facing the strongest light in the room. 
We do almost everything imaginable, just because na- 
ture never attached this fatigue-register to our eyes. 
We get a headache in the end, but even that is not 
labeled so that we may know where it came from. 
We squeeze our eyes literally out of shape, but the eye 
is the one thing the shape of which we can not see, and 
so we do not know it is deformed until the oculist 
tells us. 

Finally, if we overwork with our eyes, we who teach 
seldom get enough exercise with the rest of our muscles. 
The muscles should have been provided with an exer- 
cise-gage if nature had been fitting men to do most 
of their work at desks. But here again nature pre- 
pared the simpler methods of knowledge to fit the 
simpler stages of life, and left us to work out the more 
complex problems of our more complex life with higher 
forms of knowledge. 

I hardly need to dwell longer on these lines of con- 



302 GEXETIC PSYCHOLOGY FOR TEACHERS 

sideration. If you will not see that a higher form of 
knowledge is demanded of you than that which comes 
to you through your senses, then further argument 
will not convince you. And as to the means of meeting 
all these limitations, you are referred to the very excel- 
lent treatises n-ow in existence on personal hygiene and 
school hygiene. We can not go into the details of this 
study now. The study of one's own nature gives many 
hints as to realms of desirable knowledge beyond, and 
one of the natural sequents of our teacher-study is, as 
I hope you see, a perusal of hygiene. Do not think you 
can get on without this enlargement of your world of 
knowledge. You will never do your full duty as a 
teacher until you learn to surround your pupils with 
healthful conditions of air and heat and light, and 
nature did not provide you with the necessary senses to 
accomplish all this without study. 

Let us turn now to a second line of thought whicii 
has been discussed here and there throughout this 
course. What can the teacher with all his and her 
regular duties, hope to do in the way of actual study of 
the problems appropriate to the profession of teaching? 
Generally, teachers have been urged in answer to this 
question to take up some line of child-study. 

Child-study has been something of a disappointment 
to the world at large. There are a few enthusiasts who 
seem to be satisfied with the results, but in general the 
results have to be recognized as rather meager. I think 
one can understand the limitations of much of our child- 
study. In the first place there has not been enough 
preliminary teacher-study. It has been the aim of this 
whole book to convince you of that and so I shall not 



SOME LIMITATIONS OF OUR NATURE 303 

dwell on this necessary preliminary to child-study any 
longer. The limitations of child-study to which I wish 
to call your attention now are those which appear in 
the very problems which have been attacked and in 
the methods which have been employed. If we could 
get a new view of the productive problems and methods 
of this study, I believe much might yet be done for 
child-study. 

One of the general problems which has been very 
prominent in the minds of those who have undertaken 
the study of children has been the problem of ascertain- 
ing the time when certain traits of character and cer- 
tain instinctive forms of action first show themselves in 
the child's life. Such a study of the time facts of 
mental development can be undertaken only in one of 
two ways. Either the history of a single child is care- 
fully followed, and then the result will not be a general 
formula applicable to other children, or a large number 
of cases are brought together in what is known as an 
average time for a whole class of children. This aver- 
age time is, however, just as inapplicable to the single 
child as the history of the single child was inapplicable 
to the whole class. Indeed, it is a familiar principle of 
all statistical inquiry that average results hold true only 
for masses, not for individuals. Thus, when we say that 
the average life of man is thirty-three years, this has 
no meaning whatsoever for the individual. It means 
only that while some individuals die young and others 
die at an old age, the general average of all lies be- 
tween the extremes. Note that we are not denying that 
for certain broad general purposes there is value in 
statistical inquiry, but we are stating that the value of 



304 GENETIC PSYCHOLOGY FOR TEACHERS 

such inquiries is not in their immediate utility for the 
teacher who deals with small numbers of children and 
who should, in an ideal educational system, deal with 
these children as individuals. 

Our criticism of child-study is not, however, directed 
merely against the method, it is directed also against the 
choice of the problem. It makes very little difference 
after all at what moment a certain event occurs. If you 
want to understand the inner character of an event you 
must go about the study of the conditions which lie back 
of the event. Science is interested in the time of an 
event only in so far as the time helps to locate and de- 
fine the underlying conditions. Law courts sometimes 
inquire into the time of events, but they want the time, 
not for itself, but for the purpose of discovering through 
the location in time what the causes were which pro- 
duced the fact. 

The only legitimate reason for inquiring what a 
certain child does at a certain time, or for inquiring at 
what time the child shows a certain trait, is that we 
want to make use of this time fact in order to understand 
the real inner nature of the child's development. But 
we shall get at this problem of the inner development of 
the child's nature much more directly and completely 
if we neglect very largely the mere time facts and attack 
the main problem of the analysis of the child's mental 
nature. One can see the evil results of neglecting the 
analysis and seeking dates and times only. The time 
investigation usually gets at nothing but superficial 
expressions. Furthermore, it is a matter of practical 
observation that a child will, when ripe for a new step 
in his progressive life, frequently fail to show this fact 



SOME LIMITATIONS OP OUR NATURE 305 

by any external sign. If we are attending merely to 
the time problem and its superficial determinants, we 
shall make a twofold mistake. In the first place, we 
shall get onr time wrong because we shall not see the 
inner trait in question when it first really began to 
exist. And in the second place, we shall be hindered in 
doing the most advantageous thing for the child by the 
absorption of our interest in the earlier or later appear- 
ance of a mental condition which we should very often 
not wait for but actively engage in producing. A care- 
ful examination of the disagreements that appear in the 
results of various studies of children, can leave little 
doubt that most statistical averages of children's habits 
contain a large number of cases in which the external 
manifestation of characteristics has been delayed for a 
period, thvis rendering the average time too late for the 
real demands of natural education, and consequently 
vitiating the results entirely and rendering them wholly 
worthless to the teacher. 

The really important question for the teacher is this: 
What are the conditions that must be fulfilled before 
the mind is prepared for a new step in development? 
Or to make the matter concrete, suppose one is about 
to teach fractions, the question is not, "When is the 
child going to exhibit a natural interest in fractions ? " 
It is rather, " What are the mental conditions which will 
make it natural for interest to arise ? " The time when 
a phenomenon takes place is significant only in so far as 
the appearance of that phenomenon shows that certain 
conditions have already been fulfilled. What we must 
know are the conditions. If we know the conditions 
and can control them, we can then produce the phe- 
20 



306 GENETIC PSYCHOLOGY FOR TEACHERS 

nomenon at such a time as we may deem appropriate. 
And I take it that it is in very large measure the busi- 
ness of educational endeavor to produce certain proc- 
esses of mental development at a rate which is more 
rapid and in a way which is more economical than that 
in which the same result would have been accomplished 
without supervision. 

Such a knowledge of the conditions of the child's de- 
velopment can best be gained through concentration of 
attention on some single definite phase of mental de- 
velopment and through a close analysis of the succes- 
sion of conditions actually appearing in such develop- 
ment. Study the way in which your children progress 
in writing or arithmetic, or whatever you please. Do 
not take up all these subjects in the same year, but di- 
vide the work, and concentrate each year on one par- 
ticular cycle of growth and study it carefully and fully. 

This is the sort of child-study which I hope may 
issue from our review of teacher-study. Let the dates 
of nascent periods go. JSTever mind at what age abstract 
thought begins. Do not even devote yourselves to a 
determination of the date when the pupils of your grade 
pass from the state of " savagery " into that of " bar- 
barism." The dates will take care of themselves if you 
know how to recognize and manage the conditions of 
mental life at those periods. 

A third line of thought which I wish to touch upon 
briefly concerns our relations as workers in the broad 
field of education. We have taken up these chapters 
from different points of view — you from the point of 
view of practical school life, I from the point of view 
of the university student of science. There are some 



SOME LIMITATIONS OF OUR NATURE 307 

of you I know, for I meet such people in every company 
of teachers, who look with some degree of misgiving on 
the universities and the work they are trying to do by 
way of studying education. And I am very sure that 
there are a great many university men who doubt 
seriously the propriety of our taking up this close re- 
lationship with the schools. 

The fact is, universities and public schools have 
been separated by a wide breach ever since there began 
to be universities and common schools in our occidental 
civilization. The universities, as you know, came first, 
and represented at the time of their origin, as they have 
down to a very recent date, the spirit of exclusiveness 
and specialization. The universities were attended by 
the ruling class, and the priestly class, and later by all 
those connected with the so-called learned professions, 
but they were not attended by the common folk. The 
influences that emanated from the great centers of learn- 
ing in Europe reached the people only in the most in- 
direct way. 

The result of this exclusiveness was twofold. In 
the first place, the universities, removed from the ac- 
tivities of common life, cultivated a form of study and a 
form of training that was highly artificial. There came 
to be a conventional university spirit which in its worst 
forms was, and is, arrogantly boastful of its remoteness 
from the people. And while the universities were thus 
withdrawing more and more into the narrow circles of 
their own exclusiveness, the effect upon the common 
man was the cultivation of a feeling of disrespect for an 
institution that did not deal more directly with the 
common, practical affairs of life. And even to-day it is 



308 GENETIC PSYCHOLOGY FOR TEACHERS 

not difficult to find business men, and men in many 
other wallvs of life, who sneer at the university. 

When the common school began its long struggle for 
establishment and recognition, it was, in its very birth, 
and because of the attitude of the universities, an insti- 
tution at variance with the universities. The common 
school came to embody the ideals of the common man, 
it fitted his needs and prepared for his workaday life. 
University men regarded the people's school as so funda- 
mentally different from the university that in the older 
civilizations of Europe even to-day we have the spec- 
tacle of two distinct systems of education: one for the 
boys who expect to attend the universities and through 
the universities to enter upon the professions, the other 
system adapted so far as may be to the non-university 
class — one might almost say the antiuniversity class — 
the common folk. 

The antithesis between university and common 
school has unfortunately been seen in our own land 
which boasts so often of its freedom from caste distinc- 
tions. To be sure, we have done more than any other 
nation to remove this antithesis, but we have it yet. 
The institution of our American educational system 
which more than any other has shown the effect of 
this struggle between the spirit of exelusiveness on the 
one hand, and the spirit of practical helpfulness to the 
common people on the other, is our American high 
school. 

The history of our high schools is a most remark- 
able educational record. The old Latin schools of 
colonial times were distinctly preparatory schools for 
the highly specialized universities of that day. The 



SOME LIMITATIONS OF OUR NATURE 309 

common people did not attend either Latin schools or 
universities. But the pressure from the common 
schools was very great, and soon there began to arise in 
distinction to the Latin schools, academies and general 
high schools which were equipped to give the common 
people more advanced training than they could receive 
in the common schools, but in a spirit and form differ- 
ing from that exhibited in the Latin schools. The 
public high school of to-day is a compromise between 
the university preparatory school, or Latin school, and 
the academy or general high school. Its influence has 
been great in remodeling our university life and in re- 
modeling also the life of our common schools. The 
breach between the plain man and the proud academic 
scholar has not been healed by this high school, stand- 
ing as it does between them and reaching out toward 
both, but certainly the difference is less than it used to 
be, and compromises are easier to make, and revisions 
of educational creeds more frequent, because of the in- 
fluence of this high school in which we are all inter- 
ested. 

But while the high school has done much toward 
establishing unity where there was before division, yet 
the careful student sees all too clearly that unity and 
harmony are not yet at hand. The traditions of cen- 
turies are yet alive. 'New forms of subdivision threaten 
our system. The high school is not practical enough, 
says the plain man once more, and he endows a technical 
school. The university is too abstract, let us have en-, 
gineering departments, and schools of agriculture and 
schools of forestry. And the academic man in his turn 
shrugs his shoulders at the new professors of " corn- 



310 GENETIC PSYCHOLOGY FOR TEACHERS 

planting and wood-chopping," and breathes out the wail, 
"It is learning's decline! Let its withdraw once more 
into our academic exclusiveness! " 

All this lack of harmony finds most emphatic ex- 
pression in the views held by school men on the matter 
of the training and securing of teachers. Who among 
us has not heard the criticisms launched against uni- 
versity graduates, who, fresh from the flights of aca- 
demic experience, have sometimes shown themselves 
deplorably incompetent to walk along the practical 
paths of school life? And, on the other hand, who 
among us has not noted with approval the plea of this 
or that great educator for the better training of teach- 
ers, and for the more frequent attendance of our com- 
mon school-teachers on the courses offered by the uni- 
versity? 

We all of us know perfectly well that in the pres- 
ence of such a fundamental lack of harmony there is no 
use of one party trying to put the other out of court. 
The facts are that our educational system is not a 
unit and never can be a unit as it now exists. I shall 
not seek to gain the ends of harmony by asking you to 
give up altogether your belief that there is something 
wrong with the university, nor shall I tell you falsely 
that the university is coming to accept your modes of 
thought and teaching as its own. What I have to say 
is by no means as final as that, and yet it is, I believe, 
more hopeful for the future of American education 
than either of those propositions would be. 

What is true, is that the universities are rapidly 
taking up the work of making a thorough study of all 
phases of education. The universities see, no less clearly 



SOME LIMITATIONS OP OUR NATURE 311 

than the teachers in the schools, that our American sys- 
tem is not a unit, and they have finally been frank 
enough and clear-headed enough to say that the whole 
problem shall be opened for full examination and re- 
vision. In this task of canvassing the whole situa- 
tion, the universities ask the schools of other grades 
and interests to join. jSTo intelligent word on edu- 
cational problems escapes the careful students of edu- 
cation in our American universities to-day. Indeed, 
very many of our universities have gone further. 
They have undertaken to organize within themselves 
practical departments for the special study of educa- 
tion. All over the country are growing up depart- 
ments of education, or teachers' colleges, within the 
universities. 

I can speak only with somewhat less assurance of the 
spirit on your side. But I am profoundly in error if I 
do not observe the same tendency among the more pro- 
gressive leaders in the schools. Certain it is that the 
modern normal school is taking up its task in a much 
broader and more comprehensive way than did the nor- 
mal school of a few years ago. Certain it is that the 
books which teachers read in these days are not so 
much as they used to be mere collections of devices. 
The indications show clearly enough that teachers are 
studying education, not merely their own grade work, 
and not merely formal methods. 

All this is more hopeful for the future than any lazy 
agreement between the schools and the universities 
could possibly be. If the lack of unity in our American 
system has set us all thinking, then lack of harmony 
has not been by any means an unmixed evil, and lack 



312 GENETIC PSYCHOLOGY FOR TEACHERS 

of harmony will not last very long after the study and 
thinking begin on all sides. 

What I have said in regard to universities and schools 
in general, I shall now take the liberty of repeating in 
regard to our relations to each other. I would not seek 
to tell you in any dictatorial fashion how to teach 
your classes. I offer to you university-made studies 
on education. I want to insist that you recognize 
the fact that study carried on in a university may in- 
clude material gathered from every source from which 
educational facts can be gathered. I wish you to un- 
derstand especially that we study your kind of educa- 
tion in the universities. I have made bold to ask you to 
follow the processes by Avhich some of us work out our 
views about the schools, and then I leave this material 
with you. I am quite willing to have you subject it to 
criticism. I am quite willing to have you improve upon 
it. As I understand it, that is the way in which we are 
to work out the salvation of American education, by 
contributing each the kind of material he has at hand. 
The main exhortation I would leave with you is, study 
education. I shall be glad, of course, if you can accept 
some of my lesser exhortations. But I shall not insist 
so much on those. 

I shall, however, do my duty by my minor exhorta- 
tions as well as by my main proposition. I shall add a 
brief summary of each of the chapters so that you may 
see the conclusions clearly after all the details have been 
removed. 



SOME LIMITATIONS OF OUR NATURE 313 

I. Teacher- Study, its Scope and Aims 

In periods of change in educational methods, teach- 
ers often find it difficult to adjust themselves to the new 
order. 

Teachers need to study their own education at such 
times. Their own capacities and their own difficulties 
are quite as important to understand as are the needs 
of their pupils. 

A study of the teacher's education will also throw 
much light on the character of the mental development 
of pupils. 

Some very good illustrations of the teacher's present 
state of mental development may be borrowed from the 
study of ordinary perception of space. 

Length as we see it, depends on the character of the 
surroundings and on the individual's mental standards, 
both of which may vary. Illusions are figures which are 
so new and so complex that we interpret their lines in 
a way different from that in which we should interpret 
the same lines if they appeared in simpler figures. Prac- 
tise with such complex illusory figures makes it possible 
to overcome entirely the illusion. Thus, it is shown 
by direct experiment that practise may modify one's 
way of seeing lengths. 

Direction and size are recognized in the same way 
as length. 

If one can find new possibilities of self -study in such 
a simple case as this, the further pursuit of teacher- 
study certainly promises to bring to light material 
worthy of examination. 



314 GENETIC PSYCHOLOGY FOR TEACHERS 

II. How Experiences are Consolidated into Inter- 
pretations OF Meaning 

The images that strike the eyes, and the sounds that 
come into the ears, are not attended to for their own 
sakes, but are interpreted in such a way as to concen- 
trate attention on their broader meanings. 

Developed mental life of all forms, is constantly 
dealing with meanings. Sometimes the meanings at- 
tached to experiences are right, sometimes they are 
wrong. When wrong the distinction between experi- 
ence and interpretation becomes very obvious. 

Education consists very largely in training in the 
recognition of the true meanings of experiences. 

Meanings arise from experience, but they are not due 
to mere memory, that is, mere retention of experiences 
in their original forms. Meanings are consolidated 
experiences — experiences stripped of their unnecessary 
and non-essential factors and reduced to their lowest 
terms. Meanings can be learned only by working over 
and sifting experiences for oneself. Consolidation of 
experience may sometimes go so far as to leave behind 
no possibility of revision or enlargement. This is to 
be avoided by a judicious combination of memorj^, or 
retention, wdth consolidation. 

III. The Origin of Some of our Educational 
Ideals 
The absence of immediate results makes the teach- 
er's work largely dependent on ideals. Ideals are some- 
times blindly borrowed from tradition or from wholly 
outside sources. The teacher's ideals are to be regarded 



SOME LIMITATIONS OF OUR NATURE 315 

as consolidated social experiences. They represent the 
fixed, and often unreasoned, forms of educational 
thought. 

For example, it is very difficult to account rationally 
for many of our accepted traditions of school order and 
instruction. 

The reform of traditions can be effected economically 
and advantageously only by a careful examination, first, 
of the grounds of present practises, and secondly, of the 
true foundations of rational practises. 

The changes in our course of study demand most 
urgently such rational consideration. Nature-study, 
for example, and especially manual training, can not be 
rejected because of any lack of agreement with earlier 
traditions of school life. Perhaps it is the traditions 
which should be rejected. This is clearly the case with 
our traditional attitude toward bodily movement. All 
our modern science shows that earlier ideals were at fault 
in their sharp separation of mental and bodily activity. 
Bodily activities parallel mental life at every point. 
It is necessary for us to modify our ideas of activity so 
as to include certain inner activities and certain con- 
stant external activities Avhich often escape attention. 

IV. The New Ideals of Development 
The gradually disappearing traditions of the past are 
making place for the new ideals of development. 

Development is most fully understood in connection 
with the bodily life of animals and man. Individual 
variations from the parental type are the first steps 
toward development. Advantageous variations are 
favored by natural selection. The variations thus se- 



316 GENETIC PSYCHOLOGY FOR TEACHERS 

lected are transmitted from generation to generation. 
This process of develoj^ment ends in tlie adaptation 
of a species or individual to the environment. 

Social habits are transmitted, not through struc- 
tures, but through imitation. 

At the beginning of development an individual is 
neither good nor bad, he is simple unadapted to his en- 
vironment. Development begins thus with possibilities 
of either good or bad. Our whole notion of the child's 
moral character is coming to be determined by this 
view. 

Mental development consists in a change of a very 
fundamental type in the character of mental activity. 

Development is usually non-rational, that is, not 
guided by any consciousness of the ends to be attained. 
Such non-rational development in the child should be 
guided by a teacher who is conscious of the course and 
ends of the child's progressive changes. The teacher 
thus becomes the rationalizing factor in the pupil's men- 
tal development. 

V. Individuality, Adaptation, and Expression 
Development would not be possible if all individuals 
were alike; there must be variation. The highest form 
of individuality, the type to be cultivated in the school, 
is not attained by making all children alike, but by 
fostering advantageous variations and cultivating differ- 
ent individuals along the lines most appropriate to their 
various capacities. 

Not refinement of functions, but the fitting of func- 
tions to the environment, is the end of development. It 
is possible to be over-refined in certain directions. In 



SOME LIMITATIONS OF OUR NATURE 317 

working out the ideal of adaptation, the term environ- 
ment must be broadly interpreted. It should include 
more than merely scholastic subjects, or technical in- 
terests. Especially must the environment of the child 
in the schools be extended so as to include the broad 
social life accessible only through indirect modes of 
knowledge. 

The modern ideal of training is that it can be at- 
tained only through activity, not through mere receptiv- 
ity. In the acquirement of knowledge, the senses are 
active; attention and feeling are conditioned by activ- 
ity; memory and the formation of ideas are dependent 
on practical interests. 

The activities of the child have not, up to this time, 
been sufficiently investigated — thus a broad field of pro- 
ductive study opens up to the individual teacher. 

VI. The Teacher's Writing Habit 
Writing is, first of all, an organized movement. The 
various fingers that hold and move the pen, and also 
the hand, and the arm, all contribute to this movement, 
but they do it in such a way as to cooperate with each 
other in a single well-coordinated act. 

The index-finger is most active in downward strokes, 
the thumb, and in less degree the middle finger, guiding. 
In upward strokes, it is the thumb that does most of the 
work, the two fingers guiding. Such coordinated action 
is the result of organization in the nervous centers. 
This organization is a result of gradual growth and not 
of arbitrary Avilling. 

Individual differences in nervous organization show 
themselves in the different forms of writing, and may 



318 GENETIC PSYCHOLOGY FOR TEACHERS 

be demonstrated by means of experiments showing 
the different parts pLiyed by fingers and hand in dif- 
ferent individual cases. Even in the same individual, 
the coordination may be modified by changing con- 
ditions. 

An effort to develop greater regularity in the slope 
of one's writing brings out the fact that there is a phase 
of movement — a slight pronation — especially important 
in securing regularity of slope. This is not a subject 
of direct attention as a movement, but is developed 
through a blind series of trials and failures during 
which attention is directed chiefly to the written lines. 
This brings us to the general question of the direction of 
attention. In developed automatic writing, it is on the 
thought. In undeveloped writing, it is on the written 
forms. 

VII. Eacial and Individual Development op 
Writing 

Racial development does not furnish any direct sug- 
gestions as to the proper sequence of work in the school, 
for the child must be adapted to a wholly different en- 
vironment from that which the race faced. Racial de- 
velopment, however, shows the aim of development and 
some of its difficulties, in such a way as to give indirect 
suggestions advantageous to the teacher. 

The race began with picture-writing. This grad- 
ually gave way to writing which imitated sound lan- 
guage. Ultimately, a sound alphabet was developed. 
The present forms of letters are due to a series of 
developments in which the character of the writing 
material, the demands for rapid, easy movement, and 



SOME LIMITATIONS OF OUR NATURE 319 

the demands for legibility, beauty, and expression, have 
all been operative. 

The child's movements are at first uncoordinated, 
uncertain, and discontinuous. This is due to the fact 
that the nervous system is unorganized, and impulses 
are diffusely discharged. The diffuseness appears, not 
only in the irregularities of hand movement, but also in 
the movements of head and body which accompany wri- 
ting. Diffuseness is the first stage of all development 
of movement. 

Practical suggestions. Large free exercises should 
precede writing. Organize all the movements of all 
parts of the body. Give play to individual coordina- 
tions very early, and aim at the development of these 
coordinations as the chief end of the training. Make 
the child critical of his own writing. 

The problem of the meaning attached to written 
words brings us to the next topic, Eeading. 

VIII. The Process of Reading 
Modern methods of teaching reading aim to culti- 
vate the ability to recognize meaning as rapidly as pos- 
sible. This leads sometimes to a failure to recognize 
the stages of the reading processes preliminary to recog- 
nition of meanings. And such failure to recognize the 
process, is all the more dangerous because in adult life 
the process is automatic and therefore not a subject 
of attention. 

The process of reading is a very active process in 
that it requires active adjustments of the eye and active 
response in the organs of articulation. 

The process of reading is complex in that it requires 



320 GENETIC PSYCHOLOaY FOR TEACHERS 

a recognition of the elements of words and their fusion 
into single wholes. This kind of mental synthesis un- 
doubtedly comes to include, in the highest stages, not 
merely single words, but whole phrases. 

The synthesis of elements into single wholes as we 
have it in the recognition of words, gives us a clue to 
the process of synthesis by which words and meanings 
are combined into unitary wholes. The active element 
in such a case as the latter must always include factors 
other than the mere articulation movement. Emotional 
reactions are obvious in the rate and intensity of articu- 
lation itself and in accompanying phenomena. Other 
reactions of a less obvious kind also appear. 

Meaning can be grasped only in terms of individual 
reaction. This is the lesson of practical, rather than 
purely theoretical, verbal training. 

IX. The Idea of ISTumber 
A study of the development of the number idea 
shows that in its elementary form it was very ancient. 
In its fully developed form it depended on the relatively 
late discovery of certain special modes of numerical ex- 
pression and manipulation. 

What, then, is the specific characteristic which 
makes the number idea distinct from all other forms of 
thought? Number is an expression of grouping, and 
number processes are processes of regrouping. Thus, 
7 plus 5 equals 12, means that given two small groups, 
one of seven, the other of five, we may group them to- 
gether in a single large group of 12. Other processes 
are of like character. 

The number idea is distinct from any of its concrete 



SOME LIMITATIONS OF OUR NATURE 321 

applications, so that when a problem in application is 
presented, it calls for three distinct kinds of thought. 
First, a recognition of the real relations; secondly, 
their translation into group ideas; and finally, the 
manipulation of the groups according to mathemat- 
ical laws. 

Number is abstract. It is a mode of arrangement 
which may be thought of as applied to any objects what- 
soever. Number processes are limited only by the de- 
mand that they be consistent with each other. The 
science of mathematics deals with the consistent modes 
of grouping objects. 

Applied arithmetic should be reasonable in its ex- 
amples. Never lose sight of the purely mathematical 
relations. Make your instruction cover these relations 
completely, and fix these relations thoroughly through 
drill. Develop the abstraction after starting with the 
concrete objects. The abstraction is the essential phase 
of the development. 

X. Some Limitations of our Nature 
Nature never provided us with senses suited to secur- 
ing direct knowledge of the artificial indoor environ- 
ment in which we live. We must use a higher form of 
knowledge. We must know about proper hygienic con- 
ditions through special study. 

We can not understand or direct children properly 
by merely noting the time when they exhibit certain 
characteristics. We must study the conditions that lie 
back of the stages of development in which we are in- 
terested. This determines the proper lines of study, 
and investigation in child-study. 
21 



322 GENETIC PSYCHOLOGY FOR TEACHERS 

Our American educational system is not well organ- 
ized. There are signs of improvement. The most 
promising indications are to be found in the coopera- 
tion of universities and common schools in the study of 
education. 



INDEX 



Abstraction, 279, 292. 
Academies, 309. 
Activity, 76, 147, 260. 

and adaptation, 157. 

bodily and mental, 88, 96. 

constant, 94. 

in development, 247. 

and emotions, 152. 

and impression, 90. 

vs. movement, 95. 

negative, 95. 

sensory, 148. 
Adaptation, 106, 113, 134, 197. 

direct, 142. 

indirect, 142. 

human, 143. 

school, 146. 
Addition, 122, 269. 
Aldus, 216. 

Analysis of words, 253. 
Animal consciousness, 118, 
Applications, 16, 32, 47, 58, 
66, 67, 95, 132, 193, 225, 
233, 262, 284, 287, 292. 
Arabic numerals, 267. 
Arithmetic, 275. 

business, 138, 277. 

primitive, 266. 



Arm exercises, 225. 
Arm movements, 223. 

in writing, 173, 176, 186. 
Arm-movement writing, 176. 
Art, 200. 
Articulation, 281. 

and reading, 242, 244, 
Ascham, 78. 

Atmospheric perspective, 42. 
Attention, 147, 150. 

in writing, 190, 231. 
Automatic habit of writing, 

187. 
Averages, 303. 

Barter, 279. 

Bee, 118. 

Biology, 79. 

Body and mind, 86. 

Breathing and mental state, 

93. 
Bryan, 246. 
Business arithmetic, 138, 277. 

Capitals, Roman, 209. 
Cattell, 241. 
Cellini, 45. 

Chick's development, 221. 
323 



324: GENETIC PSYCHOLOGY FOR TEACHERS 



Child, 303. 

contrast with adult, 5. 

recognition of size, 9. 
Childhood, variation in, 110. 
Child's nature, 110, 113, 241. 
Child's writing, 220. 
Child-study, 4, 79, 295, 302. 

through recollection, 5, 27. 

true problem, 305. 
Chinese writing, 202. 
Church schools, 77. 
Circulation of blood, 93. 
Class instruction, 133. 
Color-blindness, 155. 
Colors and distance, 42. 
Community, teacher's relation 

to, 136. 
Condensation of experience, 56. 
Condensed experience, inflexi- 
ble, 63. 
Consistency in grouping, 282. 
Contrast, 89, 91. 
Coordination, disturbed, 167, 
168. 

center of, 166. 
^ muscular, 165. 

in writing, 169. 
Copy in writing, 230, 232. 
Copying, 178. 

Correlation of studies, 289. 
Counting, 119, 270. 

primitive, 265. 
Criminal, 115. 
Culture epochs theory, 197. 
Curriculum, 138. 

development of, 83. 
Cursive, 212. 
Gushing, 265. 



Damascius, 44. 

Darwin, 153. 

Deaf-mutes, 252. 

Decimal system, 273. 

Depth, 39. 

Development of activity, 26. 

and activity, 153. 

biological principle, 103. 

and condensation, 56. 

of coordination, 223. 

of curriculum, 83. 

equilibrium in, 107. 

extent of, 31. 

idea of, 100. 

individual, 109, 197-199, 

of M, 207. 

of meanings, 46. 

mental, 20. 

of movements, 168. 

muscular, 222. 

of perception, 11, 20, 26. 

of perception of sizes, 8. 

principles of, 6. 

racial, 197-199. 

and retention, 56. 

social, 108. 

stages of, 117, 121. 

writing, 6. 
Dewey, 101, 267, 
Diffuse movement, 220. 
Digestion and mental state, 

93. 
Discipline, arguments for, 76. 

American schools, 78. 

school, 110. 
Discrimination, 155. 
Dislike, as present meaning, 
52. 



INDEX 



325 



Distances, perception of, 120. 
Division, 272. 
Dodge, 239. 
Drawing, 34. 

vs. writing, 218. 
Drill, 60. 

in arithmetic, 291. 

Ear, 148. 

Ears, two, 36, 53. 

Education, 32, 48, 99. 

through contact, 62. 

liberal, 146. 

methods of, 144. 

practical, 138, 146. 

study of, 311. 

by use, 60. 
Egypt, 204. 
Embryology, 103. 
Emile, 111. 

Emotional expressions, 153. 
Emotions, 151. 

and activity, 152. 
English psychology, 87. 
Environment, 133, 139. 

immediate, 140. 

natural, 141. 

social, 135. 
Equation, mathematical, 269. 
Erdmann, 239. 
Euclid, 267. 

Experience and interpretation, 
56. 

and meaning, 48. 
Experiment, psychological, 36, 
38, 88, 92, 119, 152, 
170, 177, 183, 239, 243, 
246. 



Experimentation in psycholo- 
gy, 21. 
Expression, 241. 

of emotions, 153, 257. 

and knowledge, 90. 
Eye movements, 239. 

in reading, 240. 
Eyes, 148, 301. 

moles', 105, 133. 
Eyes, two, 36, 54. 

Fear of horses (illustration), 

51. 
Feet, training of, 168. 
Fine muscles, 222. 
Finger movements, 175, 222. 

illustrated, 172. 

in writing, 164. 
Fixed interpretation, 63. 
Fixity of method, 67. 
Fluency in writing, 214, 231. 
Foot, 108. 

Form-study, 32, 276. 
Fractions, primitive, 266. 
Franke, 71, 78, 110. 
Froebel, 78. 
Fusion of letters, 245. 

of words into sentences, 257. 

of words and sounds, 251. 

in telegraphic language, 250. 

Games, learning, 60. 
Geography, 79, 81, 83. 
Geometry, 267. 
Grouping through counting, 

269, 272, 273. 279. 
Grube method, 290. 
Gulliver's Travels, 122. 



326 GENETIC PSYCHOLOGY FOR TEACHERS 



Habits, 65. 

Hall, 101. 

Hand, in counting, 265. 

training of, 109. 
Hand movements, 172. 

in writing, 174, 175, 185. 
Hansen, 242. 
Harter, 246. 
Heart, 92. 

and attention, 150. 
Heredity, 105. 

social, 108, 126, 232. 
High school, 308. 
History, 57. 
Huey, 239. 
Humidity, 300. 
Huxley, 101. 
Hygiene, 302. 

Ideals, borrowed, 71. 

educational, 70. 

professional, 73. 

revision of, 82. 
Ideas, 156. 

and attention, 150. 
Illusions, 116. 

of arrow-heads, IG. 

of circles, 17. 

demonstration of, 18. 

disappearance thi-ough prac- 
tise, 24. 

of inten-upted line, 30. 

of filled space, 28. 

of length, 16. 

measurement of, 23. 

of parallels, 30. 

of size, 13. 

unnoticed, 18. 



Illusions of weights, 88. 
Imitation, 125. 
Impression, 153, 241. 
Incidental education, 226, 

289. 
Individual development, 109. 
Individual variation, 104. 
Individuality, 130, 132. 

in writing, 228. 
Indoor objects, 12. 
Inflexible interpretations, 63. 
Instincts, 120. 
Interest, 111. 
Interpretation, 48. 

double, 55. 

as experience, 56. 

of sounds, 54. , 

in vision, 54. 
Investigations for teachers, 27, 
33, 102, 158, 192-194, 263, 
292, 306. 
Italics, 216. 

James, 79, 99, 101, 120, 151, 

260. 
James-Lange theory, 151. 
Jastrow, 149. 

Lange, 151. 

Lapses in writing, 189. 

Latin school, 308. 

Laurie, 76. 

Learning games, 60. 

Learning languages, 250. 

Legibility of letters, 214. 

Lehmann, 242. 

Length, recognition of, 10. 



INDEX 



327 



Lifting person, 89. 

Lighting, SOL 

Line, recognition of, 10. 

Localization, auditory, 37. 

Logic, 283. 

Lucretius, 14. 

M, the letter, 207. 

Magic, 44, 45. 

Manual training, 84, 139. 

and equipment, 85. 

parents' view of, 85. 

teachers' view of, 84. 
McLellan, 267. 
Meanings, 40. 

of coins, 41. 

false, 43. 

vs. impression, 49. 

vs. memory, illustrated, 51. 

museum specimens, 47. 

physical conditions, 91. 

present, 51. 

in reading, 236. 

of sentences, 258, 259. 

of words, 41, 47, 57, 256, 
259, 262. 
Measurement, 267. 
Medieval schools, 77. 
Memory, 50, 56, 58, 61, 291. 

and ideals, 74. 

vs. practical education, 60. 

as variable element, 65. 

and variation, 64. 

work, 59, 62. 
Mind-reading, 149. 
Minot, 106. 
Minus quantity, 271. 
Mirrors, concave, 44. 



Mirrors, interpretation of, 55, 

63. 
Mistakes, 116, 
Mole, 103. 

Monks as teachers, 77. 
Mosso, 93. 

Mosso's balance-board, 93. 
Movement, diffuse, 220. 

excessive, 224. 

in school, 75. 
Multiplication, 268, 272. 
Miinsterberg, 244. 
Muscle-reading, 149. 

Nascent periods, 304. 
Natural selection, 105. 
Nature-study, 32. 
Necromancy, 45. 
Nerve-cells, 166. 
Nervous centers, 166. 
Non-rational development, 123. 
Number names, 265. 
Number systems, 266. 
Numerals, Arabic, 267, 268. 

ordinal, 270. 

Roman, 268. 

Pain in education, 115. 

Paleography, 218. 

Pedagogical science, 310. 

Pedagogy, 67. 

Pen, position in writing, 229. 

Pen-strokes in writing, 164. 

Perspective, 7. 

Petrarch, 216. 

Phoenicia, 204. 

Phonetic methods, 255. 

Picture-writing, 199. 



328 GENETIC PSYCHOLOGY FOR TEACHERS 



Planchette, 149. 

Plateau in development, 248. 

Play, 73, 123. 

Pleasure, 152. 

Port Royal schools, 78. 

Position in writing, 227. 

Posture, 94. 

Practical education, 138. 

Practise curve, 24, 25, 247, 249. 

Present meaning, 51. 

Priests, ancient, 43. 

Printing, 215. 

Problems in arithmetic, 284, 

285, 294. 
Prodigy (mathematical), 117. 
Pronation, 179. 
Psychology of impression, 87. 
Public schools, 307. 
Punishment, 114. 
Puritans, 77, 78. 

Rational conduct, 127. 
Reading, amount of, 237. 
Rebus, Egyptian, 205. 
Rebus-writing. 205. 
Receptivity, 147. 
Recognition vs. memory, 50. 
Records, keeping of, 21. 
Refinement, 134. 
excessive, 13G. 
Reforms in arithmetic, 288. 
Review, 34, 97, 98, 128, 129, 

195, 234. 
Robinson Crusoe, 122. 
Roman capitals, 209. 
Roman schools, 76. 
Round writing, 175. 
Rousseau, 78, 111, 140. 



Savage, 145. 

School discipline, 75, 110. 

Oriental, 75. 

origin, 77. 
School environment, 139. 
School, purpose of, 263. 
Scripts, medieval, 215. 
Sea-gulls. 120. 
Selection, natural, 105. 
Selection of movement, 224. 
Self-education, 6. 
Sense-training, 154. 
Sensory activities, 148. 
Sentences, meaning of, 258. 
Sight, 301. 

Sizes, recognition of, 7, 9. 
Skin zero, 300. 

Slope of letters, 180, 184, 218. 
Slope, practise on, 185. 
Smell, 134, 148, 298. 
Social development, 108. 
Social heredity, 108, 126, 232. 
Solidity, 39. 
Sound-writing, 209. 
Space, education in, 276. 
Spatial relations, 278. 
Speech as symbolism, 204. 
Speer, 276. 
Speer method, 293. 
Spelling, 253-255. 
Spelling-book, 236. 
Spencer, 58, 145. 
Statistical method, 303. 
Stevenson, 69. 
Subtraction, 270. 
Summary: 

Chapter I. 313. 

Chapter II, 314. 



INDEX 



329 



Summary: 

Chapter III, 314. 

Chapter IV, 315. 

Chapter V, 316. 

Chapter VI, 317. 

Chapter VII, 318. 

Chapter VIII, 319. 

Chapter IX, 320. 

Chapter X, 321. 
Superstition as interpretation, 

43, 49. 
Syllables distinguished, 20G. 
Symbolic writing, 202. 
Systems of number, 266. 
Systems of penmanship, 162. 

Tact, 60. 

Taste, 148. 

Teacher as rationalizing fac- 
tor, 124. 

Teachers' colleges, 311. 

Teachers, training of, 60, 310. 

Teacher-study, 3, 34, 192, 295, 
302. 

Telegraphic language, 245. 

Telepathy, 242. 

Temperature sense, 299. 

Ten, 273. 

Tests, 69. 

Touch, 149. 



Tradition and ideals, 74. 
Transmission, 105. 
Tutors, 133. 

Uncials, 213. 

Undeveloped movements, 168. 
Universities, 307. 
Unpleasant experiences, 152. 

Value, idea of, 42. 

Value, physical conditions, 91. 

Variation, 129, 131. 

individual, 104. 
Ventilation, 298. 
Vertical writing, 175. 

Walking, 20, 188. 
Wallace, 120. 

Whispering, unconscious, 243. 
Word-method in reading, 252- 

255. 
Words, and letters, 245. 

meaning of, 259, 262. 

recognition of, 240. 

written, 174. 
Writing, 161. 

by pictures, 199. 

records, 172, 174, 176. 

teaching of, 125. 
Wundt, 295. 



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